Over the weekend at the Cardano Summit 2021, InputOutput (IOHK), the technology company building Cardano’s open-source blockchain, announced its strategic collaboration with Chainlink Labs to integrate Chainlink’s leading decentralized oracle network as Cardano’s preferred oracle solution. The announcement arrived on the heels of Alonzo facilitating smart contract development on the Cardano network.
In an official statement, IOHK Founder Charles Hoskinson called integrating Chainlink’s market-leading oracle solution an “easy choice.”
“Not only will integrating Chainlink price feeds reduce the go-to-market time for Cardano developers, but it will establish a secure foundation for Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem, helping make Cardano more trusted by users around the world,” Hoskinson said.
During the summit, Chainlink Labs’ Head of Blockchain Partnerships, Niki Ariyasinghe, virtually joined IOHK’s Marketing and Communications Director, Tim Harrison, to discuss the upcoming integration’s two-stage process and how the collaboration between Chainlink and Cardano will accelerate the development of a multi-chain world.
As the largest decentralized oracle network powering the vast majority of DeFi, Chainlink enables smart contracts by securely delivering off-chain data on-chain and providing a growing range of decentralized services. Ariyasinghe said developers can use these decentralized services to build increasingly advanced hybrid smart contracts that bring cryptographic truth to a wide range of platforms and industries.
He explained Chainlink’s broader vision “to focus on building an open-source standard for how this type of cryptographic truth can enable blockchains and smart contracts to actually make useful applications for the world,” highlighting parametric insurance as a life-changing use case for smart contracts built on Chainlink’s secure, verifiable, robust data feeds.
“There’s a whole range of other really interesting data we hope to bring to platforms like Cardano so your users can build really interesting applications on top of that data,” he told Harrison.
Ariyasinghe said Chainlink’s recently announced Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) creates additional opportunities to collaborate with Cardano in building a multi-chain world. He underscored the “tremendous amount of respect between the Chainlink and Cardano ecosystems” as well as the “collaborative nature” of the Cardano community.
The integration will roll out with a two-stage process: an initial testnet launch introducing Chainlink’s crypto price feeds, followed by a mainnet launch giving developers access to Chainlink’s broad range of price feeds and decentralized services.
Ariyasinghe emphasized that the integration between Cardano and Chainlink is “a very high hurdle,” as Chainlink’s high security, reliability and scalability standards will secure hundreds of billions of dollars in TVL on Cardano’s unique blockchain. Ultimately, he said, it’s a hurdle he’s confident that “a strong collaboration” between the technical teams at IOHK and Chainlink Labs will clear with a “very robust, highly reliable and highly scalable integration.”
Watch Niki Ariyasinghe’s full conversation with Tim Harrison at the Cardano Summit.