This Friday’s episode of the DeFine podcast, produced by Stake DAO, features Chainlink Labs’ VP of Go-To-Market, Johann Eid, who described his own moment of revelation when discovering Chainlink as the crucial link connecting the walled garden of blockchains to the rest of the world and its data.
With an interest in using his programming background to develop cross-chain scaling solutions, Eid said he was frustrated by 2017’s surge of whitepapers describing blockchain-based applications with no blueprint for obtaining essential off-chain data.
“None of these folks and companies were talking about data and I think, at the time, they were all confused about how to get this data,” he explained.
“That’s how I got into Chainlink, because it was answering these big questions I had every time I was reading a whitepaper: ‘How is this even possible?’ ‘How are you going to do this?’”
Eid first met the Chainlink Labs team before the DeFi industry took shape.
“The stuff we were discussing at the time is basically what would happen with DeFi. Applications need data to actually grow and to create interesting use cases and I wanted to build this vision,” he said of his decision to join the team.
Eid emphasized that he wasn’t alone in seeing and understanding this vision of the future. Among the many things that distinguish Chainlink, he said, is its community of dedicated Link Marines.
“I wasn’t the only one who got this. Obviously, a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, wait – Chainlink is the missing piece of the puzzle for these blockchains to actually take off. You need actual real-world data if you’re going to create a lot of these cool applications,’” he explained.
“I think a lot of very smart people got into this community because they believed a long time ago in the vision. And they got very excited by the vision and they started writing articles and blog posts and contributing on socials.”
Eid said the Chainlink community’s dedication comes from believing that a blockchain-powered world is the future and Chainlink is what allows that world to take shape. From his perspective, Chainlink’s oracle technology and its community have already achieved the momentum needed to see its vision through.
“I think a community like this, which believes in a vision, doesn’t actually need a lot of enablement. It just needs to see that we’re doing the work, that you’re supporting the ecosystem. Because, in the end, that’s the vision they believe in: a blockchain ecosystem which thrives, which is able to get access to real-world data, and which is able to build cooler and cooler use cases to actually really create this decentralized vision that we all believe in.”
Listen to Johann Eid’s entire interview on the DeFine podcast.