Last Friday, the Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon got underway as the largest Chainlink hackathon to date, surpassing even Chainlink’s Spring 2021 Hackathon, which attracted over 4,000 participants from 170 countries and 140 project submissions.
Some of those projects – like NFT marketplace Nifty Royale, dynamic NFT game CryptOrchids, synthetic index token-minting platform Catalyst, and weather derivatives marketplace Vulcan – are being developed into industry-disrupting startups that have successfully raised millions of dollars in funding and attracted the attention of high-profile advisors.
During a fireside chat with Juan Benet at the Filecoin Orbit event last week, Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov said he’s excited to see what developers build with the array of new Chainlink data feeds and decentralized services released in just the past few months, particularly two categories “that are underutilized but have a lot of potential.”
One is Chainlink Keepers, which substantially expands the scope of what developers can efficiently build by automating essential smart contract functions. The other is novel data feeds like the Associated Press’ U.S. elections data, economic data, sports game outcomes and business financials, which will be cryptographically signed and delivered on-chain via the AP’s official Chainlink node.
Nazarov said these data sources combined with new off-chain compute capabilities will give rise to “unique and previously unseen” smart contract permutations capable of solving a variety of trust issues across industries.
During the Fall Hackathon’s opening ceremony, Nazarov welcomed a record-breaking number of developers competing in two tracks for over $500,000 in prizes to build world-changing applications using Chainlink’s market-leading oracle network.
“We are creating a society powered by truth rather than a society powered by weak trust assumptions and weak trust promises,” he said of Chainlink’s overarching goal to provide developers with the infrastructure needed to architect systems that uphold definitive truth.
Nazarov’s vision of The Truth Machine composed of oracle networks connected to blockchains that are controlled by private keys is a vehicle toward a future where agreements are cryptographically upheld and saying one thing but doing another simply isn’t possible anymore.
He views Web3 as the end state or final form of the internet revolution made possible by hybrid smart contracts that go beyond voting and tokenization with capabilities like random number generation, automation, and proof of reserves.
“I’ve never seen this much opportunity in our industry,” he said.
“If you can build cryptographically guaranteed systems, you can achieve the things that people in the traditional web world have been trying to achieve for decades but haven’t been able to achieve because they didn’t have the right infrastructure.”
He signed off with an inspiring message to hackathon participants:
“The contracts that people didn’t think were possible yesterday are now possible today.”
Watch the Chainlink Fall 2021 Hackathon Opening Ceremony.
Elizabeth Licorish is a writer and author whose work has appeared in HuffPost, PhillyVoice and Bustle. In 2008, she wrote and co-authored Innovation for Underdogs. In 2010, she wrote and edited Charles Manson Now. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Rutgers University and has ghostwritten hundreds of executive thought leadership pieces for some of the world’s leading experts across diverse industries. She has been writing and editing for influential blockchain projects since 2017, when she fell in love with decentralized finance’s potential to empower individuals in an economically just world. As the editor-in-chief of Chainlink Today, she’s passionate about telling the human stories behind some of the most promising technology in the fastest-growing blockchain ecosystem.