At the 2022 GeckoCon hosted by CoinGecko, Chainlink Labs’ Lauren Halstead moderated a virtual panel titled “Leveraging Blockchain Data In A Web3 World” with Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik and 0x Labs’ lead data scientist, Danning Sui. The discussion explored various ways off-chain data integrates with web3 infrastructure to create new use cases, products, and industries now and into the future.
Svanevik and Sui emphasized that virtually every web3 project needs to interact with off-chain data related to financial markets, weather, sports results, etc. either directly or indirectly. As the blockchain industry’s largest decentralized oracle network, Chainlink comprises more than 1,000 bespoke oracle networks delivering those real-world datasets on-chain.
“You have to think of a blockchain as a closed-loop system and a project like Chainlink is what gives the blockchain eyes and ears and its senses that connect it to the real world,” Svanevik explained.
Data plays a fundamental role in achieving the transparency that is paramount to web3. For developers, on-chain data creates transparency around the growth of the ecosystems they’re building. “An amazing part of web3 is that all of the data is open, so you can know your competitors’ data,” Sui explained.
This comparatively silo-free environment is rapidly refining existing applications and giving rise to new trends such as NFT indexes and web3 reputation identities.
The panelists also described some of the biggest challenges of leveraging web3 data in an increasingly multi-chain world – particularly indexing, labeling, and structuring curated on-chain datasets.
Looking toward the future, they see real-world data becoming increasingly important to web3 industries like gaming and NFTs, the latter becoming data richer as they reflect a history of ownership over time.
“Great NFTs come with a story and that story is often encoded in blockchain data,” Svanevik said.
Sui is already watching the rise of new data projects built on top of existing use cases. “I definitely see the data awareness and usage going up in the future,” she said.