SmartCon 2022
Chainlink's SmartCon has more than lived up to expectations, and they were extremely high, to begin with. Here is a summary of what was announced:
Economics 2.0. Economics 2.0 includes various initiatives to secure and enhance oracle networks. These include staking, SCALE, BUILD, and a set of technical innovations.
Staking, a darling of the community. It will be live in December this year, and on Monday users will be able to check if they are eligible. Staking rewards are expected to be around 5%.
Staking will launch in v0.1 with an initial pool of 25M $LINK tokens with plans to scale to a pool of 75M $LINK tokens. v0.1 will have their staked locked until v1.
BUILD is a program to help grow the Chainlink ecosystem with technical support and enhanced services in exchange for a % of the project's token supply. There are 4 participating projects so far:
Truflation
Krypton Protocol
BitsCrunch
Space and Time
SCALE allows blockchains and layer-2 networks to fast-track smart contract innovation in their native ecosystems by covering operating costs (e.g. transaction gas fees) of Chainlink oracle networks for a period of time. SCALE participants include household names like:
Avalanche
Metis
Moonriver
Moonbeam
CCIP or Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol, will enable blockchains to communicate with each other, and that includes smart contracts. CCIP will open a new kind of dApps previously unimaginable due to the closed nature of blockchains.
Some use cases that we can see take off from day 1 thanks to CCIP are:
Cross-chain yield harvesting
Cross-chain collateralized loans
Programmable token bridge
CCIP will come with an Anti-fraud network that will monitor for fraudulent cross-chain activity, and protect users.
FSS or fair sequencing services tackle the MEV problem by oracle nodes ordering blockchain transactions via consensus, rather than having a single actor deciding the order.
FSS
FSS will reduce greatly the amount of frontrunning, and sandwich attacks among other types of transaction reordering attacks
Deco
DECO -my personal favourite- is a Chainlink service that will use zkp (Zero-knowledge proofs) to prove an application some information without revealing anything more than necessary.
An example. Let's say you want to borrow 10.000 USDC from Aave but in your wallet, there are only 2.000 USDC. However, in your bank, you have $100.000. With DECO you will be able to prove to Aave that you will be able to repay the loan without revealing how much money you have in your bank.
Identity use cases are in my opinion the coolest. Imagine renting an apartment without revealing where do you work, how much money you make, your race, your age etc. Or distributing an NFT ensuring that each person only gets 1, leaving bots empty-handed.
There have been some partnerships announced at #SmartCon:
Swift
-Connects with 11.000+ banks
DTCC
-Processed over 2.4 quadrillion on 2021
Plus the fireside chat with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Nazarov was really inspiring for the Web3 future.
