The Future of DeFi and Chainlink

Transcript

hello everyone you've all successfully made it to day three of eat cc i think that's an accomplishment give yourself a round of applause awesome so today i'm here talking a little bit about the future of defy and chain link and to kick things off i want to go back i want to go back in time a long time ago to around 2005 was anyone not even in existence in 2005 that was quite a long time ago at this point all right a couple people here but in 2005 i was sitting in a musty classroom which coincidentally happened to be a french class

and i had a friend tell me about this really cool new web app facebook it seemed logical it seemed to make sense it was a web app you could connect to friends you could see what was going on around you but at the time i didn't know what a big deal the introduced introduction of facebook and other social media platforms were going to be we were sitting at this nexus this change point in human history that was going to fundamentally change how human beings connected and work together fast forward to 2022 social media is dominating human attention we've got examples like tech talk instagram

twitter hundreds and hundreds more and if you look at the usage numbers on these they blow the mind tick talk has a billion monthly active users right there's about eight billion people on this planet and a billion people use tick tock every single month and they don't just use it a little bit the average time for a user on tick tock is 94 minutes a day think about that 94 minutes every day on average for a billion people the way that we connect to each other the way that we consume content online has fundamentally changed since that early early introduction social media way back in 2005 and obviously there's other examples i'm

just focusing on the major ones and so if you look at what that meant for human society social media created a world connected by digital content so we had a very important moment in human history in 2005 and i think we're on the cusp of another huge transformation in human society when you look at blockchain and when you look at defy this is technology that once it exists you can't go back right there's no way to get rid of social media social media will always exist in some form with it the good and the bad and i think it's up to all of us to think about the future that we're creating with blockchain technology and defy and think about how can we

encourage the good and try and limit the bad because as we look at the world in 2022 and if you look at what chain link is trying to do we're trying to create a world powered by cryptographic truth so we're another of these nexuses in human society where we think we can create a better world and in many ways it's a world that we can't go back from and so we should all work together to make it as wonderful and as amazing for humans as possible my name is stephen fluen and i'm head of developer relations for chain link labs and i have one of the best jobs on the planet my job is to make users of chain link and users of blockchain technology successful and to understand and empathize with all the builders out there

and try and reflect those needs onto our team how many people here consider yourself a builder in the blockchain ecosystem awesome most people here so we're all required to work together here during my talk and throughout the future in order to try and create this amazing future that we all think can exist we always have backups all right so today's plan i'm gonna go through this in generally three parts so first i'm gonna start off talking a little bit about smart contracts generally and the state of defy and where d5 has come and where it's going then i'm going to talk a little bit about chain link's vision

and finally i'm going to talk about the approach that chain link is using so first let's talk about smart contracts in d5 the growth of smart contracts has been crazy there was this famous quote from 2011 by mark andreessen about software is eating the world and i feel like the same thing is happening with blockchain every use case for web 2 technologies every developer out there that is building something today we're looking towards a future where maybe that's being powered by cryptographic truth because when we look at the fundamentals of these technologies when users have control when we have decentralization these are properties that benefit everyone from a monetary standpoint

whoops uh and actually one of some of the memes that we've heard across the ecce so far this week we've heard about this concept of regenerative societies we've heard about decentralization i i love the meme of coordination right we have systemic change we think we're all here building together a new way of doing things and as we look at the state of the world right now it's actually relatively small right we've got defy with a lot of value locked up and then you look at crypto in general and you've got even more but this is just a tiny tiny piece of the broader puzzle that we think is the potential of the world the market for what we call trust minimized applications is literally hundreds of trillions of dollars

right so we are at the very first steps of creating this new future this new world one of things that we like to think about is how are we going to power all these great things and we think chain link is a fantastic way of doing that and if you look at the data that we're seeing today chain link powers about 70 percent of defy across all the oracles so this is something that we care a lot about because we think that chain link is a fantastic way of doing this one of the the products that we have that i'm going to talk a little bit about later is price feeds so getting accurate cryptographic truth coming from decentralized sources published on chain and we're really happy to celebrate that this year we've hit over three

billion data points published on public blockchains that's that's a really huge milestone but there's a bunch of different ways of looking at this as well one of the things that i look at instead of just total value secured because that could just be a few huge projects right there could be lots of data points that no one's using but one of the things that we think about is maybe there's an element of an attention economy to this how many people are paying attention how many people are using and building these technologies and we're really happy to celebrate and announce that as of this month there's over 11 000 github projects using chain link this is one of our our core metrics that we look at in terms of understanding what are developers building for tomorrow so when i think about the future of defy

we've heard lots of themes across ecc we've heard about scale right if we think about that small small tiny portion of the pie that we have today and the huge potential that it has we're going to continue to see d5 grow we think about security we've heard about hacks and compromises and the ways that we can all do better by working together we've heard a lot about this idea of multi-chain how can we live in a world where there are more l2s possibly more l1s more types of chains more decentralization that comes from this variety of technologies and how can some of those things all be powered and be chain-linked now i want to turn a little bit towards chain-link's vision so that everyone

kind of understands the way that we see the world in some of the direction we're going so we really do at our core believe that the world should be powered by truth rather than trust and so we believe that smart contracts are essential to creating that future when you have these cryptographic truth guarantees it benefits you in many many different ways right one of the first things that drew all of us to this room and to these decentralized technologies is the idea that we can have control and one of the things that i love about it is that when you do it this way the transparency in the systems are unavoidable right you cannot have a smart contract running on a public blockchain that does

not have its code in some level compiled or not compiled available to everyone there's no way for someone to just change what's happening behind the scenes without it being completely transparent about what happened one of the things that we're seeing is that even if you look at centralized finance today they are still looking for the same sorts of truth that we have on the blockchain they want cfi wants what defy already has they want decentralized prices they want robust market coverage and these are things that you can get on-chain today when you look at the chain-link vision we think of a world that has decentralized chain-link networks

right every price fee that we have and i'll again i'll get into price feeds in a little bit is powered by what we call a dawn or a decentralized oracle network where instead of individual oracles being relied upon for security it's a network it's that decentralization aspect where you can get the best of both worlds chain link is an open source project you can find all the source code for our core node software for the external adapters that we're using on the chainlink repository and we try and package this up in a way that makes it easy for anyone to both come into the blockchain become a smart contract developer become a smart contract dap user or run their own nodes

so now let's talk a little bit about the approach so how are we actually going to get to this vision what are the the tools and the services that we're focused on building that are going to create the future of define create the future of chain link i'm going to talk about just a few of the services and platforms that we're trying to build and so i'm going to start on the services side first up we have data feeds how many people here have used a chain link data feed in some way wow again most of the audience so for those of you who didn't raise your hand effectively what chain link has done is we've enabled a ton of decentralized oracle networks over 900 networks at this point to be collecting data from various

independent sources and then coming together to create a consensus around that data and publishing that data on chain and this is what powers all of that defy that we were talking about before if you're interested in actually looking and exploring some of the data that exists out there i recommend you check out data.chain.link has a fantastic explorer where you can actually look at all the data that's being published what are the heartbeats for each of the price feeds what are the nodes that are operating these independent nodes that are putting that data on chain chain link price feeds have full market coverage covering both decentralized exchanges as well as centralized exchanges right anywhere that the data could come from is where we want the independent node operators pulling that

data from sometimes that data is even premium sometimes it comes with the cost the more data you can get the better the consensus you can build across those nodes all the price feeds are built on volume-based average methods which we think is a better way of collecting and reporting on that data and we want this data to be available on as many blockchains as possible one of the offshoots that you're going to see of price feeds that's actually identical from a smart contract developer consumer standpoint is called proof of reserve if you haven't heard of proof of reserve it's actually a really cool thing it combines again on chain and off chain data in a way that can give you an understanding of the reserves

of a dao of an organization that's really focused on security reliability and compatibility chain vrf is another fantastic service powered by chain-link nodes so if you haven't heard of vrf it's a verifiable random function it's a source of randomness on chain that is more secure and it's actually resilient against mev attacks so if you think about a naive implementation using something like a block hash randomness isn't truly random in a deterministic environment like blockchains and so other smart contracts if you're doing it in the default way that a lot of developers think about when they first start doing this they can make mistakes and the results of the randomness can be predicted by

smart contract developers by miners by validators and this ends up becoming a big problem and so by using vrf to get randomness you can make sure that your have numbers that are actually random in a verifiable way there's lots and lots of use cases for vrf you can probably think of a few but a few that we see a lot of teams using are things like selecting lottery winners creating random traits in dynamic nfts we're going to see more and more use of vrf over time as people want to build creative applications where every user's experience is differentiated in a way that is meaningful another service that's worth mentioning

is chain link keepers so you can think of chain link keepers as automation for your smart contracts it's got a decentralized event driven execution model where when you write a smart contract in solidity you can write an upkeep method and you can write a checkup keep method and the magic here is that you can actually run that checkup keep to determine whether or not your contract needs to be activated you can run that off chain and so that check can be run every block without incurring any sort of gas cost and this is kind of a magical hybrid of being able to do things off-chain in a way that's verifiable everyone can execute that method and see what the results are so you know that it's correct but then you can bring the results of that computation on chain and re-verify it all programmatically

so you've got a smart contract development team they take their smart contracts and they add two simple methods and then register it on a decentralized oracle network called the keeper network and that automates all the smart contracts one of the things that we've seen is that keepers has been really critical for this next stage of defy because whenever you need to be reactive to what's happening on the blockchain that is not a native functionality of the blockchain there's no way to say when this variable hits this value do this right you have to have something off chain doing that and you can do it yourself essentially but then you're not doing things in a provable way you're not doing things in

a trust minimized way whereas keepers uses this decentralized oracle network in order to perform that automation whether it's liquidations rebalancing compounding limit orders all of these things cannot be done natively on chain and so you need a tool like keepers i was sitting with my team a few weeks ago because one of the things we we love doing is we love looking at all of the hackathon projects that come out and what we do is we look at where is the innovation coming from in our industry what is the next generation of dapps that are going to be built and so we have these meetings every time we run a hackathon because we get hundreds and hundreds of projects that are trying to kind of change the world and we look at what are the things that they care about what are the things that

they are trying to accomplish and we look at chain links current services and products and we look at chain links platform and we say how can we continue to make this better and so one of the things that we see is that a ton of people love the platform aspect of chain link you do not have to rely on the decentralized oracle networks that exist today you can build your own and one of the ways that a lot of people think about doing this is connecting to existing web 2 applications we call this any api or the request model so you can operate a chain link node or have a group of people independent operators operate chain like nodes and you can make requests out to the web 2 world and this is powerful because this is really kind of the fundamental vision

of chain link from my perspective this idea that you can connect to any data that exists on the internet and bring it back on chain where you need it to perform these decentralized operations to build these decentralized applications and it actually goes one step further than that so in addition to just standard web 2 apis we our node software actually supports something called external adapters where you can write any arbitrary code in a turing complete environment and that code can be executed by a chain link node and then bring that data on chain pull data off chain put it somewhere else using these decentralized and trust minimized principles so let's just talk briefly about chain

link's future i think if we look towards the future that we're trying to create we want more cryptographic truths for everyone right we talked about how today defy in crypto is a small portion of the digital agreements but every digital agreement that exists can be enriched by this concept of cryptographic truth we've announced in the past we've announced staking is coming we've announced the roadmap for v01 we've announced a 1.0 2.0 things like that so if you're interested in that definitely take a look we have some great blog posts on that in the past we've also announced our cross-chain interoperability protocol so ccip and this is one of the things that we

see as we move into this multi-chain world is you need rock solid message passing you need the rock-solid infrastructure that's going to power the way that you can operate smart contracts across chains and there's a lot of things that i'm excited about that i can't even talk about today but one of the things i want to do is i want to put this out onto all of you what are the tools that you need because we're listening we care about solving problems for developers both developers that exist in blockchain today as well as web 2 developers that are thinking about how can i build more decentralized applications how can i give users control and privacy back how can i make my application more trust minimized

so that we get these experiences that we all know are going to be powering the future so the thing you should be remembering about chain link is this vision that we have that i think is shared by a lot of people here that we want to create a world powered by cryptographic truth so if this is interesting to you let's talk a little bit about what you should be doing because it can't all be on us right everyone has to cooperate here one of the examples that is particularly relevant to defy is that we've actually created a github repository called defy minimal this is a set of sample contracts that can give you a kickstart if you're trying to get into d5 if you thought hey i see all these great protocols out there that are solving

cool problems in d5 we want to give you a kickstart that helps you do that and so we've got things like staking we've got things like swaps we think that these code samples the easier we can make this process and the more excited we can get everyone about building new d5 applications the more successful we're all going to be another way that everyone can get involved is we actually have a booth right outside so obviously come and talk to us if you have questions if you have ideas we want to hear because one of the things that i fundamentally believe is that none of us can create the future on our own we have to work together i'll just cover two more quick ways of

getting involved we have a our own conference that we're running in september in new york as well as online called smartcon so we've run smartcon the last couple years but this is the first time it's going to be in person and we've set a goal and set a bar for smartcon that everyone walks home from the event every day with something they can go try something they can go do because that's that's the essence is not just thinking about this idea of the future not just talking about it let's go and build something let's go and connect something because that's where the real value is created additionally if you like any of these principles or you didn't raise your hand when i asked who was a builder we actually run a very very successful hackathon twice a year

so generally it's in the spring and the fall so sometime around september october we're going to be kicking off our fall hackathon and we would love to have everyone here we generally have hundreds of thousands of dollars as prizes and hundreds of teams end up getting formed and actually successfully submitting projects at the end and all this is done public and i love just going through the projects and seeing where the industry's going thank you so much everyone have a great time [Applause] oh

people you