At last week’s 2021 Global DeFi Summit, the leading gathering of global DeFi experts, Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Real Vision Crypto Editor Ash Bennington for a fireside chat about the architecture of hybrid smart contracts and Chainlink’s place in the broader DeFi ecosystem.
Bennington began the discussion with a nod to Nazarov as “a man with a vision.” This vision is detailed in the 136-page Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper, written by 14 academic researchers and oracle experts including Nazarov. Two months after the whitepaper’s publication, Bennington asked where Chainlink is on the roadmap to 2.0 and how far it has to go.
“What is the vision for version 2.0?”
Chainlink 2.0 outlines the architecture of hybrid smart contracts’ two essential parts: deterministic on-chain code and decentralized oracle networks (DONs) that provide equally trust-minimized off-chain services.
Nazarov explained how more decentralized services will power more advanced hybrid smart contracts to ultimately build Web 3.0.
“If initial world of smart contracts was a single on-chain contract about tokenization, and then there was the appearance of a voting contract as a second on-chain contract that interoperated with the token contract, and then DeFi was actually the addition of an oracle network to provide price data and market data to an on-chain contract about a financial product – then the future is really multiple on-chain contracts or on-chain pieces of code interoperating with multiple decentralized oracle networks, just like multiple pieces of web server code interoperate with multiple services.”
“Where are you along the path to execution of that vision?”
Nazarov said the goal of Chainlink 2.0 is to create an abstraction layer of DONs that provide all of the necessary trust-minimized resources – data, computation, random number generation (RNG) – developers need to quickly and efficiently create a hybrid smart contract. New decentralized automation services like Chainlink Keepers are rapidly accelerating this abstraction layer’s utility.
“We’ve already taken the development cycle for DeFi down from months to days,” Nazarov said.
“And what we want to do is we want to take it down from days to hours.”
“We’ve already taken the development cycle for DeFi down from months to days. And what we want to do is we want to take it down from days to hours.” – Sergey Nazarov
Chainlink 1.0 gave rise to some of the very first DONs which now power the majority of the DeFi ecosystem. Nazarov said Chainlink 2.0 is about “expanding the breadth and depth of that capability” so that developers can build more advanced use cases that go beyond DeFi to reinvent global industries like insurance.
“What Chainlink 2.0 is really about is creating a universe of services and capabilities to make hybrid smart contracts in a very efficient, secure, easy-to-build way so that our industry can become about much, much more.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s fireside chat with Ash Bennington at the 2021 Global DeFi Summit.