By Solomon Odunayo
ETC Labs has recently announced its partnership with Chainlink to bring decentralized oracles to Ethereum Classic.
According to the report, Ethereum Classic and Ethereum do not naturally communicate with off-chain services due to the fundamental consensus mechanisms that control specific behavior in the network.
This implies that blockchains can only process transactions in a determinism manner using on-chain data.
Chainlink is capable of giving smart contracts access to data providers, web APIs, enterprise systems, cloud providers, IoT devices, and other blockchains.
Also, Chainlink is a popular and proven decentralized network. It’s expected to give Ethereum Classic smart contracts the ability to interact with off-chain resources with the same security assurances as the underlying blockchain.
This is termed critical in the sense that smart contracts are as secure as their weakest component. This implies that a fully decentralized smart contract is still not secure if it’s powered by a centralized oracle.
Chainlink serves as a solution to these issues by bringing decentralization to the data source and the data retrieval process.
The data source can be decentralized by the developers by sourcing data from different data providers. Moreover, developers can decentralize the method of retrieving data by making multiple independent Chainlink oracles fetch the same data point.
Founder of ETC Labs, James Wo said, “This extended functionality to off-chain environments substantially scales the number of use cases smart contract developers can create using Ethereum Classic and ultimately makes it easier and more seamless for developers to build on Ethereum Classic.”
One such use case is providing DeFi applications on Ethereum Classic secure and reliable access to the ETH/ USD price via their Price Reference Contract. This reference contract consists of 21 independent Chainlink oracles that each submit a price that gets aggregated and submitted on-chain. This use of aggregated data provides a robust canonical result that can be queried and utilized by users or DeFi projects.