Polkadot has announced the imminent integration of Chainlink oracles.
It will be the first blockchain ecosystem not based on Ethereum that will support Chainlink and the first Substrate-based oracle solution. The official statement states that Chainlink is destined to become the leading oracle supplier for the entire Polkadot network, and for all Substrate-based chains.
Thanks to this integration, Polkadot developers will be able to use Chainlink’s decentralized oracles to quickly connect their smart contracts to the inputs and outputs required to operate them safely and reliably, avoiding problems related to oracle distribution, such as slow or additional costs.
Moreover, this initial integration with Substrate will initiate a path that will result in Chainlink’s integration via a dedicated parachain. A Chainlink parachain would allow Polkadot parachains and dApps to access “virtually any external, real-world resource”, however, before launching their own parachain on Polkadot, Chainlink will launch one on Kusama.
Chainlink is becoming a kind of standard in the Oracle-as-a-Service industry, such that it can count on widespread adoption throughout the blockchain world. It is a decentralized network of oracles using a security model similar to that of blockchains, namely decentralized computing. This allows smart contract developers to use multiple independent oracles to retrieve the same data, thus increasing the quality of incoming data.
Substrate is the blockchain development framework of Parity Technologies, created to increase flexibility and ease of development, considering that its modular architecture allows high-level development based mainly on logic, rather than low-level development.
In the future, the integration of Chainlink’s oracles on a dedicated parachain may multiply the number of use cases on Polkadot. One example that is being suggested is a parachain optimized for personal identity, which could query off-chain data such as digital signatures or statements that can be verified with Chainlink’s oracles.
In addition, a decentralized payment network could securely access payments in the physical world and billing data or a decentralized finance parachain could use decentralized price feeds for crypto derivatives or data from the physical world such as tokenized stock prices.
