Chainlink Boosts Ethereum DeFi with New Price Reference Data Networks

The Chainlink (LINK) oracle project had a big year in 2019, and its builders are looking to keep that stride going strong with another productive run in 2020. How?

Becoming a more useful mainspring for Ethereum’s blooming decentralized finance movement, for starters.

Toward that goal, Chainlink’s already off to the races. On January 30th, the middleware oracle unveiled its Chainlink Price Reference Data For DeFi, a new tool built on the backs of more than 25 Chainlink-powered oracle networks that can connect rising DeFi projects with a variety of important off-chain price data.

Better data streams means better dApps, and better dApps means Ethereum itself could become much more vital as a finance platform and beyond. More simply put, Chainlink’s starting to actualize on the early milestones of its long-term mission.

Toward a More Robust DeFi

“Chainlink’s Price Reference Data oracle networks vastly expand the amount of secure and reliable data accessible to Ethereum Dapps, greatly accelerating the rate at which new DeFi products can be successfully launched,” the Chainlink team noted.

Accordingly, the project’s new DeFi reference portal provides a single dashboard through which users can easily navigate through the underlying oracle networks’ price data.

The portal is organized across two main categories for now: USD trading pairs and ETH trading pairs.

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The dashboard for the current ETH/USD reference price oracle network with all 21 nodes

Out of the gates the USD reference data is supported predominately by Synthetix, which is currently one of DeFi’s largest projects, while the ETH pairs data on Chainlink’s networks is mainly powered by the new but incredibly innovative Aave project.

Specifically, the covered USD pairs initially included:

As for the provided ETH pairs, they’re as follows:

And now this decentralized price reference data can be readily used by anyone or any DeFi project, Chainlink stressed in their announcement:

“Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Networks for Price Reference Data are a shared community resource supported by its users, who pay less for using these oracle networks than it would take for them to broadcast the same data individually, while benefiting from a significant increase in the security created by the decentralization of oracle networks.”

Why It’s Useful

By itself, a blockchain like Ethereum can only know things about itself, e.g. state.

It takes a “middleware” oracle project like Chainlink to make applications on Ethereum able to relay information from the off-chain world, a dynamic that can make Ethereum’s use cases that much more powerful and flexible. As Chainlink’s builders have explained of the utility of their networks:

“While a few Dapps can operate solely using on-chain data, conservatively, 90+% of DeFi applications need a steady connection to off-chain data to function in a trusted, robust, and economically sustainable manner. Most price discovery happens outside of blockchain networks (off-chain), such as on major exchanges, and prices vary across these platforms. As a result, obtaining the most reliable price for an asset requires aggregation from multiple off-chain data sources.”

Helping EMINENT

Chainlink’s reference data news marked the second time the project made cryptoeconomy headlines this week.

The first came when the EEA Mainnet Working Group, an initiative backed by both the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and the Ethereum Foundation, revealed it had welcomed Chainlink to help head up the new “Ethereum Mainnet Integration for Enterprises,” or EMINENT, initiative.

That effort will see Chainlink coordinating with others on the creation of new standards for corporate record keeping processes on Ethereum. “Chainlink has the experience keeping different databases, run by different companies, in a state of consistency,” John Wolpert, the vice-chair of the EEA Mainnet Working Group, said.

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