What is Chainlink (LINK)?
Chainlink (LINK) was created in 2017 by Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis, who co-authored a white paper introducing the Chainlink protocol and network with Cornell University professor Ari Juels the same year. Chainlink acts as a "bridge" between a blockchain and off-chain environments. The network is used by smart contracts and was formally launched in 2019. Chainlink's LINK token is an ERC677 token, an extension of ERC20. Tokens act as data payloads, feeding the required data from off-chain sources to smart contracts, which then act accordingly in response to the data provided by the token.
Real World Example:
The network is intended to be used to facilitate the transfer of tamper-proof data from off-chain sources to on-chain smart contracts. Examples include data such weather statistics, asset prices, sporting results and many more possibilities.
Fun Fact
Chainlink oracles act as a bridge between two environments, on-chain and off-chain.
With Chainlink oracles, blockchains like Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hyperledger, and others can connect to off-chain resources such as market data, bank payments, retail payments, backend systems, events data, other blockchains, and more via web APIs.
Through this bridge, Chainlink oracles retrieve, query, and verify external data so that it can be used to trigger smart contracts residing on the blockchain.
Chainlink Links
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