Most smart contract applications and protocols rely on external oracles in some capacity, particularly for price feeds in DeFi to perform on-chain actions like checking loan collateralization or settling binary options at expiry. The importance of oracles will only continue to grow too, as projects increasingly leverage oracles to add advanced utility to their on-chain applications. After receiving overwhelming demand from our community, we’re excited to announce that market-leading decentralized oracle network Chainlink is running live on Optimistic Ethereum!
As part of an expanding feature-set, developers can now quickly and securely build DeFi apps using Chainlink Price Feeds—time-tested decentralized oracle networks that maintain high-quality, tamper-proof data feeds on-chain for various assets types like cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, FX rates, commodities, indices, and more. There already exists a large number of Chainlink Price Feeds running live on OΞ for developers to easily access today. Teams can also reach out to the Chainlink team for help in launching new price feeds across many different asset types to support their applications.
Importantly, Chainlink Price Feeds are native to OΞ, meaning they run at the underlying speed and cost of OΞ. As such, developers needing scalability can get inexpensive, low latency price updates in near real-time, unlocking a whole new class of advanced smart contract applications on Optimism’s L2 that were previously impossible on L1.
Synthetix has already integrated Chainlink Price Feeds on OΞ for low latency, low-cost oracle updates, leading to an enhanced trading experience for users. The integration supports trading of Synths on Kwenta, options trading on Lyra, and binary options of Thales.
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Some of the benefits to development teams integrating Chainlink Price Feeds include:
- High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators, leading to price data that’s aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned from outliers and suspicious volumes. Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates accurate global market prices that are resistant to API downtime, flash crash outliers, and data manipulation attacks like flash loans.
- High Update Frequency — Chainlink Price Feeds deployed on Optimism offer low latency price updates at minimal costs, resulting in precise price data that consistently reflects current market conditions.
- Robust Infrastructure — Chainlink Price Feeds utilize decentralized networks of professional node operators run by leading blockchain DevOps teams and traditional enterprises with a strong track record of uptime and tamper-resistance during market volatility, network congestion, and infrastructure outages.
- Transparent Monitoring — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical and real-time performance of price feeds.
The integration of Chainlink helps ensure that new and existing DeFi applications can migrate to the OΞ L2 with minimal, if any, changes to the code. Both teams are also working to expand support on OΞ for other Chainlink oracle services, such as Chainlink VRF (verifiable random function)—a secure and publicly auditable RNG solution for gaming and NFT dApps, Chainlink Keepers—decentralized bots for smart contract automation, and the ability to get external data and off-chain computation from any API. We envision that this combination of scalability, security, and external connectivity will unlock a massive wave of new and innovative applications on Optimism
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“Chainlink Price Feeds provide Optimistic developers with a seamless plug-n-play solution for getting high-quality data and time-tested oracles within their DeFi applications,” stated Jing Wang, Co-founder and CEO of Optimism. “Combined with our scalable infrastructure, developers can launch scalable, externally connected dApps with minimal changes to their L1 code and without having to sacrifice the robust underlying security of Ethereum L1.”
“With Chainlink oracle networks natively integrated on Optimism, developers can leverage the most decentralized and secure off-chain services for building advanced hybrid smart contracts,” stated Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink. “Chainlink’s tamper-proof and high-frequency oracle updates in combination with Optimism’s low-cost layer 2 scaling solution give smart contract developers the mission-critical infrastructure they need to build hyper-reliable, high throughput dApps.”
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