Cardano partners Chainlink to help developers build secure smart contracts

At the 2021 Cardano Summit, Cardano announced a partnership with Chainlink aimed at providing extra support for developers building smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain by integrating oracles.

The integration of these oracles on the Cardano blockchain will allow development teams on the Cardano blockchain to supply institutional-grade data provided by Chainlink into their smart contracts. The oracles will support market price feeds first and after this, the support for other Chainlink decentralized services will follow. They include; sports data for prediction markets, weather data for parametric insurance products, and verifiable randomness for gaming and digital collectables such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

A blogpost written by Tim Harrison, the Marketing & Communications Director of IOHK stated that access to real-world databases will 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 said, “Chainlink provides oracle services to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks enable smart contracts to reliably connect to any external API, leveraging secure off-chain computations for feature-rich applications.”

The collaboration between Cardano and Chainlink is said to give access to a wealth of secure data, helping DeFi achieve its promise of building a less costly and more inclusive global economic system.

What they are saying

Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK had this to say about the announcement, “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.”

He further added, “Not only will integrating Chainlink price feeds reduce the go-to-market time for Cardano developers, but it will establish a secure foundation for Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem, helping make Cardano more trusted by users around the world.”

Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, stated, “We’re excited to leverage our extensive experience and expertise by establishing native support for Chainlink on the Cardano blockchain and supporting its next stage of growth into markets like DeFi and beyond. Similar to programming interfaces in web app development, developers building DeFi applications on Cardano will be able to plug-and-play Chainlink price feeds into their smart contracts to quickly gain access to high-quality, real-time price data on a wide range of assets while still maintaining robust security and uptime. Ultimately, this will empower developers on Cardano to build next-generation applications quicker and more securely.”

Niki Ariyasinghe, Head of Blockchain Partnerships at Chainlink Labs stated, “We have a tremendous amount of respect for the Cardano ecosystem. Obviously for the technical team behind Cardano – IOG and so on – but also for the collaborative nature of the community as well. There’s a tremendous amount of respect between the Chainlink and Cardano ecosystems. Cross-chain interoperability is another longer-term goal. This is really a framework for enabling bridges between different chains and enabling a multi-chain world.”