About Chainlink

Quick take - Chainlink

Chainlink is an open-source infrastructure project that provides blockchains and blockchain based smart contracts with any type of data or computation that they cannot inherently obtain due to technical, financial, governance, or legal constraints.

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Key Points

• Chainlink is not a blockchain.
• Chainlink is a blockchain middleware.
• Chainlink is blockchain agnostic, meaning it can provide native oracle support for any network
• Chainlink is a heterogeneous (diverse in character or content) network that supports the creation of any number of independent oracle networks.

Vision

The following vision statement was published in the article "Sustainably Growing the Chainlink Network. June 2022"

Chainlink is focused on serving as a generalized decentralized off-chain computation protocol that allows Web3 smart contracts and Web2’s existing systems to obtain decentralized services that meet the hyper reliability, provable security and decentralized accuracy guarantees needed to make them a trust-minimized application.

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In the article entitled "Three Years on Mainnet", published in May 2022, the Chainlink team clearly state their overriding vision.

"From day one, the goal of Chainlink has been to provide the most secure oracle services possible to unlock DeFi and equip global industries to realize the power of smart contracts."

In depth

In the most simplistic of terms, Chainlink brings additional functionality to smart contracts.

While Chainlink’s unique oracle consensus was initially applied to decentralized data feeds, it is now expanding to include secure off-chain computation and cross-chain interoperability.

Chainlink is a permissionless protocol and an open-source framework for the creation of decentralized oracle networks that feed reliable and high quality data into your smart contracts and provide secure off-chain computation services. FROM SYL - NEEDS EDITING

Blockchains are highly secure and reliable networks for value exchange but lack the functionality to natively fetch external data or send data to off-chain systems in a manner that retains end-to-end tamper-resistance.

Through the use of secure oracles, Chainlink extends the functionality of blockchains by connecting smart contracts to real-world data, events, payments, and off-chain computation in a highly tamper-resistant and reliable manner.

Blockchain agnostic

Chainlink is a blockchain-agnostic oracle network that can run natively on any blockchain without dependencies on other blockchains, meaning it can support public blockchains and enterprise blockchains.

Blockchain-agnostic solutions are software and hardware that are compatible with many different blockchain networks, including layer 2s. They can seamlessly plug into multiple blockchain networks—transacting, reading, and making state changes—based on a single messaging format, framework, or interface.

https://blog.chain.link/chainlinks-blockchain-agnostic-design/

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Advisory Boards - Policy Making

In addition to their core offerings, Chainlink belongs to a number of organizations and advisory boards that are developing blockchain specifications and standardized frameworks aimed at boosting innovation, awareness and development within tokenized ecosystems. Find out more HERE.
https://blog.chain.link/chainlink-enterprise-blockchain-middleware/

About Chainlink Resources

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Our goal with the Wiki resource lists is to create authoritative archives for readings and other resources pertaining to specific topics.
As such, the Wiki aims to keep all resource lists current, consistent, accurate and clear.

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Timeline

Date	Media	Author	Title

Educational

Date	Media	Author	Title
N/A	Official Docs	Chainlink	Chainlink Overview
25 Sep 22	Article	Chainlink	Blockchain Agnostic: What, Why, and How?
17 Sep 21	Article	Chainlink	Chainlink’s Blockchain Agnostic Design: Native Oracle Support for Any Network
17 Sep21	Video	Chainlink	What Is Chainlink?
25 Jan 21	Article	Chainlink	What Is Chainlink? A Beginner’s Guide
30 May 22	Article	Chainlink	Three Years on Mainnet

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