At Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) 5 in Paris, France, Chainlink Labs’ Head of Developer Relations, Stephen Fluin, gave an on-stage presentation titled, “The Future of DeFi and Chainlink.” The forward-thinking talk examined today’s nascent stage of blockchain technology as a nexus of human society akin to the advent of social media, and how Chainlink’s decentralized infrastructure is designed to realize the most beneficial blockchain-powered world possible.
Fluin recalled not realizing “how big of a deal” social media would become when he first heard of it in 2005. “I think we’re on the cusp of another large transformation in human society,” he said of blockchain technology, which he sees as so transformative that, “once it exists, you can’t go back.”
As the blockchain industry’s leading decentralized oracle network, having delivered over three billion data points on-chain and securing an estimated 70% of DeFi, Fluin said Chainlink is building decentralized infrastructure to support a world powered by smart contracts, where virtually every form of digital agreement hinges on cryptographic truth instead of trust in people and institutions.
“You cannot have a smart contract running on a public blockchain that does not have its code available to everyone,” he explained. “There’s no way for someone to just change what’s happening behind the scenes without it being completely transparent.”
The Chainlink Network currently comprises over 1,000 bespoke oracle networks providing decentralized data, computation, randomness, and smart contract automation to innovative web3 applications as well as web2 platforms seeking trust-minimization.
“Even if you look at centralized finance today, they are still looking for the same source of truth that we have on the blockchain,” Fluin said. “CeFi wants what DeFi already has. They want decentralized prices, they want robust market coverage, and these are things that you can get on-chain today.”
He described Chainlink’s approach to realizing a world where trust-minimization is society’s new minimum standard by building an open-source platform packaged in a way that makes it as easy as possible for anyone to become a smart contract developer, dapp user, or node operator.
Fluin said Chainlink’s fall and spring hackathons are somewhat of a crystal ball into the future of decentralized applications.
“We have these meetings every time we run a hackathon because we get hundreds and hundreds of projects that are trying to change the world. And we look at: What are the things that they care about? What are the things that they are trying to accomplish? And we look at Chainlink’s current products and services, and we look at Chainlink’s platform, and we say, ‘How can we continue to make this better?’”
He asked the EthCC audience to contribute to this broader initiative: “What are the tools that you need? Because we’re listening.”
Highlighting resources like Chainlink’s sample smart contract GitHib repository, he emphasized, “The easier we can make this process and the more excited we can get everyone about building new DeFi applications, the more successful we’re all going to be. None of us can create the future on our own. We have to work together.”
Watch Stephen Fluin’s full presentation at EthCC 5.