During Unfold 2022, India’s premier web3 event, Chainlink Labs’ Global Head of Partnerships, Niki Ariyasinghe, joined CEO and co-founder of Superfluid, Francesco George Renzi; co-founder of QuickSwap, Sameep Singhania; and Head of DeFi and Labs at Polygon, Hamzah Khan, for a panel discussion titled “DeFi in 2030: Innovations Driving the Next Wave of Adoption.”
Khan asked Ariyasinghe how he thinks Chainlink became the blockchain industry’s leading decentralized oracle network and how the Chainlink Network will expand over the next several years.
Ariyasinghe said Chainlink’s position as the industry-standard decentralized oracle network securing the vast majority – tens of billions of dollars – in DeFi comes down to two fundamental, mission-critical features: security and reliability.
“Security is one of those understated aspects but it’s so critical and it’s so important for the growth of our industry,” Ariyasinghe said, noting that Summer 2022’s series of breaches and hacks have highlighted the pivotal role security plays.
When it comes to the off-chain data Chainlink provides through more than 1,000 bespoke oracle networks, as well as trust-minimized services such as off-chain computation and decentralized smart contract automation, Ariyasinghe affirmed, “It always starts from a place of security.”
Also essential to Chainlink’s success is its reliability. “For us, what’s paramount is providing reliable prices,” Ariyasinghe said. While it might sound like a simple concept, accurate, up-to-date, decentralized price data for digital assets like Bitcoin is crucial to DeFi users.
“If you get liquidated, it’s very important to know what the price is exactly so you don’t lose whatever you pledged in terms of your assets,” he said. “So reliability is a key enabler.”
He described Chainlink’s growth over the next several years in terms of the quality and quantity of its decentralized data and services. Much like Amazon appeals to consumers through its relative ease-of-use and vast inventory, Ariyasinghe sees Chainlink continuing native integration across a growing breadth of blockchains while providing more diverse web3 infrastructure.
“We’ll be offering an even wider range of feeds and information that’s important for DeFi projects – crypto price feeds, equity price feeds, information for prediction markets, etc. – all whilst maintaining those high standards for security and reliability,” he said. “And if you sum all of that up, that’s really what a moat means to us.”
Watch the full panel from Unfold 2022.