Cardano and Chainlink partnership will promote the development of smart contract applications for Cardano DeFi applications. Cardano DLT’s development teams will integrate Chainlink’s institutional-level data oracles into their smart contracts.
Cardano has announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink that will enable oracles to facilitate smart contract developers. According to the InputOutput (IOHK) blog post during the ongoing Cardano Summit 2021, the partnership will help smart contract developers prepare smart contracts for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. The Cardano network only recently became compatible with smart contract applications following the September 12, 2021, Alonzo network upgrade.
Perfect timing for Cardano and Chainlink partnership
The Head of Blockchain partnerships at Chainlink Labs, Niki Ariyasinghe, said he believed the timing for the collaboration was perfect considering Cardano was just joining the smart contract bandwagon. He added Chainlink had a “tremendous amount of respect for the Cardano ecosystem,” particularly the network community’s collaborative nature and the technical team behind the project.
The integration could enable hundreds of billions of dollars of value locked to be secured on the Cardano Protocol, especially in the DeFi sector. He stated:
“A lot of this comes down to timing. Cardano obviously has had an extended period where it had different drops of upgrades, and the most recent is Alonzo – really about enabling smart contracts. So for us, this is really like the right time to engage with the Cardano ecosystem.”
Cardano Smart Contracts combined with Chainlink’s Oracle Network
IOHK Marketing and Communications Director Tim Harrison said the new strategic cooperation would “help developers build smart contracts for Cardano DeFi applications.” He said, “access to real-world databases would be supplied through Chainlink’s decentralized ‘oracle’ networks which provide tamper-proof, high-quality external data to blockchains, enabling ‘smart contracts’ to execute around datasets such as election results, sports stats, and cryptocurrency rates.” Harrison added:
“Chainlink provides oracle services to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain […] Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, offering global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.”
Real-world data will be accessible on Cardano
The initial support for market price feeds will be followed by support for other Chainlink decentralized services.” These will include sports data for prediction markets, weather data for parametric insurance products, and verifiable randomness for gaming and digital collectibles such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). IOHK Founder and CEO Charles Hoskinson said:
“Oracles are essential to making real-world data accessible on Cardano, and they support advanced smart contracts, such as DeFi applications. IOHK is committed to providing developers with the most secure and robust tooling for building useful solutions on Cardano, making it an easy choice to integrate Chainlink’s market-leading oracle solution.”
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