Hi Product Hunt,
Our team has been building smart contracts since the technology first started to emerge; one of the largest problems we've consistently run into when building production ready smart contracts is the ability to connect them to key external resources.
Smart Contracts are a tamper-proof computable contract processing layer, but they do need inputs like data feeds that act as triggers, and outputs like traditional bank payments to pay end-users in the local currency they currently want to receive.
The problem we're solving for both traditional developers and smart contract developers is that smart contracts aren't able to connect directly to critical external resources on their own. This lack of external connectivity is due to the method by which consensus is reached around a blockchain's transaction data, and will therefore be a problem for every smart contract network.
We've made a secure, easy to implement way to connect smart contracts to the data feeds, web APIs and payment services you'll need to make them truly useful, and we're thrilled to be presenting this to you today. We're doing all of this to make smart contracts useful beyond tokens/coins, since we strongly believe that if smart contracts are going to mimic real financial agreements, they'll need to acquire objective proof of performance off-chain, and be able to easily pay in the format your users want to receive.
You can connect any API to a smart contract on SmartContract.com, or run our open source software yourself (https://github.com/oraclekit/cha...) as a way to easily connect your existing APIs and/or data to a smart contract. We currently support the Ethereum and Bitcoin network, with more on the way.
We also have a fully decentralized blockchain middleware solution in the works, for the maximum amount of security when connecting external resources to your smart contract, more on that soon.
We're excited to hear how we can improve ChainLink, and how we can help you apply smart contracts for your existing web application, data-driven financial agreements and/or fully decentralized application(DApp).
I run one of the largest online fintech founder groups on facebook with several billion dollars in processing volume and a few billion worth of investors both in crypto and institutional funds. We often look for technologies that we think are significant to the ecosystem and make sense from a regulatory standpoint.
This is one of them. Sergey & Steve have built a tool that is useful to the developer community.
@sergeynazarov I'm sure tons of PH users will have questions. ;)
@rrhoover - I think developers and the PH community will eat this up, I tried to tag it as "ethereum" but there was no ethereum tag.
@rrhoover@datarade Thanks for hunting us Kumar and thanks for making Product Hunt Ryan. We're excited to be on here to see how we can help the larger developer community integrate smart contracts into their existing web applications and/or get started with building a Decentralized Application (DApp) that can go beyond moving coins/tokens.
@sprinter So others have certainly thought about building this kind of thing, but Sergey has a finance/wall street background and so the team at this co actually can build something that has enterprise relevance/regulatory compliance/proper security..
@sprinter People in Slack chats will post phishing links and pose as existing projects or sites to trick them into sending money to the wrong addresses
@sprinter we make it possible to build smart contracts that do much more than their native capabilities allow. If you want to connect smart contracts to use your existing APIs, data feeds, or send payments in the format a user wants to receive, we make that easy to do.
VERY Interesting @sergeynazarov & @streamofco. I've got a few Q's
Does chain link act 1 one in the sense that PayPal,etc pushes data into the blockchain or is it two way in the sense that you can read out and query, acting as an "oracle" of sorts?
If the latter, would you describe chainlink as a community platform for creating oracle services?
How does this compare (developer experience wise) to using public nodes like infura and interacting with geth nodes via web3? Does chainlink run infrastructure with REST API or is it an SDK or is an actual smart contract?
@robertsimoes ChainLink is an oracle for smart contracts to access external resources like PayPal.
Traditional nodes don't solve the formatting, scheduling and off-chain computations issues of inputting data into your contract as a trigger for its operations.
We have a web-based tool on SmartContract.com to quickly make any API into it's own oracle contract on-chain. ChainLink is open source, so you can run it yourself if you'd like to as well. Going forward we'll have a way to represent many off-chain resources as an on-chain contract that offers that off-chain service for query by query purchase by other smart contracts.
@_pascalandy Hi Pascal, we are able to let you either make smart contracts part of your transaction/contractual execution backend, or if you're building a fully decentralized application (DApp) we allow it to interface with data/payments in the ways it needs to in order to become useful.
@_pascalandy@shoeboxdnb Sure, if you were to make a smart contract that releases payment for an international shipment you'd need the GPS and customs data to trigger payments, if you're making a financial contract around market prices you'll need those price feeds put into the contract, and if you have a smart contract insurance product around something like door locks, you'll need the IoT data to prove performance.
Question. I'm assuming Chainlink has a built-in exchange that allows for the conversion of a crypto (ETH) To the desired fiat?
If I'm understanding the product offering, whatever payments that need to be made by a Smart Contract can be using Chainlink. If that payment is in crypto, then it'll need to be converted/exchanged before sent to recipient.
@iamcardin ChainLink actually allows you to send a payment message off-chain, without cryptocurrency, it doesn't do any conversion from crypto to fiat. If you wanted to pay using a bank system or PayPal, you'd need to send it a request from your smart contract; that's what we allow. Are you looking for a way to send Cryptocurrency to a ChainLink to have it converted to fiat and forwarded onto the recipient; would that be a useful feature for what you're working on?
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