In a new video, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov outlined three challenges the blockchain industry must solve to bring the verifiable web to a billion users: connectivity, scalability, and privacy.
Connectivity
Popular web2 applications are engineered by combining multiple different data resources and services. “Netflix, Uber, all these advanced applications people use on a daily basis, they’re actually made up of hundreds, sometimes thousands of separate microservices that are all combined and all of them play unique roles around data, around compute, around connectivity,” Nazarov explained.
To create advanced web3 applications in an increasingly multi-chain ecosystem, there needs to be a single interoperability standard that facilitates cross-chain communication and the ability to optimize multiple chains in a single decentralized application (dApp). This is what Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) accomplishes.
“The Chainlink Network is the current global connectivity standard for external data to various compute resources and in many ways is becoming the standard for connectivity across chains,” Nazarov said.
Scalability
To achieve mainstream adoption, web3 applications need to reach parity with the high-speed, high-volume, low-cost standards set by web2 applications. Chainlink’s industry-leading oracle services such as Automation, Data Streams, and VRF (Verifiable Random Function) perform various computations blockchains either cannot do or cannot do efficiently so that dApps can be built to scale.
Privacy
Many applications need to protect users’ private information. Nazarov described how oracle networks can allow web3 applications to meet and ideally exceed web2 users’ privacy expectations.
“Preserving privacy is something that the Chainlink Network already creates for various types of data by using zero knowledge proofs and other technologies,” he explained. “Oracle networks can also basically be a parallel system to blockchains where the private things can live while the more public things live on blockchains.”
Combining All Three
The Chainlink Network’s ultimate goal is to enable a world where web3 applications combine web2’s scalability, connectivity, and privacy standards with the added benefits that come from decentralization.
“In that world, blockchain systems, smart contracts, oracle networks, and the verifiable applications which they create will always have an immediate, massive advantage of being verifiable and being guaranteed,” Nazarov said. “This is an advantage that the web2 infrastructure can never attain; it simply cannot become verifiable; it cannot become deterministic; it cannot become decentralized.”
He envisioned the paradigm shift verifiable applications would create for people around the world.
“You can verify what the application does and how it works before you join; you can verify how the application is performing, what it’s doing with your money, how your money is at risk; you know what’s going on with the value and your relationship with that application on an ongoing basis; and then you have the capacity to leave the system unilaterally at any time based on the conditions you initially verified,” he said.
“I think many people don’t realize that this is even an option. And the verifiable web and verifiable applications and the decentralized computing from the Chainlink Network is something that I think will bring it to them.”
Watch the full video.