In November, Chainlink launched Staking v0.2, which introduced greater flexibility, improved security guarantees, modular architecture, a dynamic rewards mechanism, and expanded access. After a nine-day Priority Migration period for existing stakers, Chainlink opened v0.2’s Early Access phase during the first week of December. Within six hours, the expanded staking pool of 40,875,000 LINK tokens was completely filled.
Staking is a community-driven cryptoeconomic security model that allows members of the Chainlink ecosystem to commit tokens in smart contracts to back certain performance guarantees of Chainlink’s oracle services. In an official announcement, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov explained how v0.2 and Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) go hand in hand as the transaction value enabled by Chainlink exceeds $9 trillion.
“Because we are seeing a consistent increase in the amount of value secured by and paid for over the Chainlink Network, it’s increasingly important to improve the cryptoeconomic security of the network,” he said.
Also in December, Nazarov was featured on CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2023 list, which praised “The Crypto Oracle” for his efforts to join TradFi and DeFi into a better global financial system.
The profile highlighted Swift’s proof of concept demonstrating how more than 11,000 financial institutions can use Swift’s PKI and CCIP to transact with a variety of public and private blockchains.
Nazarov told CoinDesk his top priority in 2024 and beyond is ensuring CCIP becomes the global standard connecting capital markets to web3, creating what he envisions will be a global internet of contracts fueled by the world’s largest liquidity layer.
Among many December highlights from the Chainlink ecosystem is Polygon zkEVM’s integration of Chainlink Data Feeds. Developers building on the EVM-equivalent ZK scaling solution now have access to high-quality market data needed to launch cutting-edge liquidity protocols and decentralized exchanges that broaden DeFi’s utility and adoption.
In an official announcement, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Borion said Chainlink Data Feeds will help generate the future of DeFi on Polygon zkEVM, beginning with the deployment of “several significant DeFi protocols” in early 2024.
Rounding out the final month of an exciting year, Matter Labs announced its hyperfast zkEVM Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, zkSync Era, integrated Chainlink Price Feeds and joined Chainlink SCALE. Matter Labs’ Senior Vice President of Business and Operations, Marco Cora, said zkSync’s cutting-edge zk-rollup combined with low-cost developer access to Chainlink’s price oracles is set to power a new wave of secure DeFi applications with the ability to scale globally.
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