Finding Chainlink fundamentally altered the trajectory of my life.
In early 2018, I was a student who was deeply engrossed in the community around Old School RuneScape (OSRS), a game I had been playing versions of for more than a decade. My experience with OSRS arguably taught me more applicable life lessons than school. These include economics via peer-to-peer trading and risk management from evading lures/scammers to even programming from writing my own bot scripts.
It was through the OSRS and related communities that I learned about the significantly inflated pricing of graphics cards, for which crypto miners were blamed. While such communities had a general disdain for crypto – a grudge that persists with the rise of NFTs today – the idea that you could generate revenue by running a program on your computer was intriguing to me.
I began mining as a hobbyist, generating just a few dollars a day, mostly out of intellectual curiosity. However, as I dove deeper into the underlying technology of Bitcoin – specifically through this excellent video from 3Blue1Brown – the value of crypto became evidently more clear to me. Crypto wasn’t about monetizing compute cycles; it was about creating a more trust-minimized society where people could exchange value without having to know or trust one another.
When I eventually looked beyond Bitcoin, as most people exploring crypto naturally do, I noticed that almost every single crypto token was deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. While investigating Ethereum’s network effect, my interest in crypto went from being a mere curiosity to commanding my complete attention.
I realized that crypto wasn’t just about providing a superior form of currency; it was about completely changing how individuals collaborate in the form of automated smart contracts. Contractual agreements run the global economy, so the idea that we could trust-minimize the entire process while bypassing rent-seeking middlemen was nothing short of revolutionary.
However, there was one hang-up: I simply didn’t understand how these on-chain contracts were supposed to interact with the real world. How would a rental smart contract know anything about the house it represents? How would an insurance smart contract know if a claim was legitimate or not? It was clear to me that, until this problem was solved, smart contracts would be limited to the creation and speculation of tokens.
I would inevitably come to understand the dilemma as the oracle problem.
Coincidently, around the same time, I stumbled upon a 17-page document on a community forum. The document described a project that would connect the world’s existing financial and data infrastructure to smart contracts and, at that point, enterprises would simply be unable to deny the value of smart contracts.
Naturally, this project was Chainlink.
Chainlink solves the oracle problem.
I immediately dove into all publicly available resources on Chainlink, including the initial whitepaper, SmartContract website, and posts by the legendary and exquisitely named AssBlaster. The knowledge gained from these resources only further strengthened my conviction.
While, at the time, there was little other public information available – the chain.link website did not even exist yet – there was this community of dedicated anons who investigated every breadcrumb for clues and alpha. When it comes to crypto communities, none compared to the sheer dedication and conviction of the Chainlink community.
Later in 2018, I found the Crypto Twitter community, including a small group of frogs dedicated to posting Chainlink memes, shitposting, and uncovering breadcrumbs. This is where “ChainLinkGod” came to be.
Once on Twitter, I found that there was a large information asymmetry about Chainlink within the greater Crypto Twitter community. This is when I started assembling various tweet threads explaining how Chainlink works, participating in public debates, and debunking misconceptions.
Eventually, I became something of a Schelling point for much of the Chainlink community. Just as I had learned the basics from anons before venturing deeper myself, I too have specialized in formatting my knowledge into digestible bites that educate the next generation of linkies.
The ten-year game plan is in motion, and we are all along for the ride.
If you want to be a part of this journey, follow me on Twitter @ChainLinkGod, peruse episodes of the ChainLinkGod Podcast, and read some of the articles my co-author and I have written on SmartContent.
We are all in this together, my frens.