Did you ever wonder what it would have been like to be around at the advent of the internet? To watch it take shape and to watch everything we've come to take for granted about it happen in real time?
Watching the blockchain space develop over the past 9 years, I've very much felt that I was getting a chance to feel what that would have been like. As a developer its been amazing watching ideas take shape and then go onto be implemented, knowing that each new piece of the puzzle enables other developers to do so much more with the technology. Its been a mind blowing experience and it doesn't seem to have any intention of slowing down.
I remember hearing about Ethereum from a friend way back when it was a whitepaper, and my immediate reaction was "Dude... this is the future. This is how everything will be built now." Sure enough, not only has Ethereum enabled a new era of blockchain that has given us dApps made of smart contracts, but now competing chains have popped up to support the same thing. Smart contracts and dApps have proven they're here to stay, and by any metric we've only seen the beginning of how they'll be used.
Now, the past few years has been amazing to watch. The creativity that has emerged in the space has begun to apply blockchains to all sorts of problems, and a lot of problems have already started to be solved decentrally. Steemit is a great example of the kinds of applications we've only just started to see. But like I said, this is still only the beginning. One of the most important problems left to be solved before smart contracts can truly eat the world is the ability to pipe meaningful data in and out of any chain and external API. This is known as "the oracle problem". And this is where Chainlink comes in.
If you recall I started this post asking if you ever wondered what it would be like watching the internet emerge, and then mentioned that watching blockchain technology develop has felt like a close proxy to me.
Watching Chainlink develop feels less like a proxy, and more like actually watching the internet be created. That's because Chainlink's entire mission is to solve the oracle problem and enable bi-directional flow of data between on-chain and off-chain resources. Or put another way, Chainlink is literally aiming to become the internet of the dApp era, connecting chains to one another and to external systems in a way that just isn't feasible at the moment.
Now, I'm not a financial advisor, and buying any crypto has its risks, but as a developer I see two critical points about Chainlink's approach to solving the problem that make it stand out to me as a feasible standard and they're why I'm long on LINK (Chainlink's token).
The first is that its aiming to solve the problem decentrally, which keeps in line with the rest of the blockchain space. This is important because a dApp is only as strong as its weakest link, and centralized oracle solutions create a single point of failure where data can become corrupted. Any oracle network that has a chance at going onto become the standard will have to be decentralized for this reason in my opinion, and at the moment Chainlink is the only decentralized oracle option ramping up for production use.
The second is that what Chainlink is creating is more like a protocol than an app, which ensures it can meet the needs of developers for years to come. The system is chain agnostic and uses external adapters to interact with various chains and external resources, and its built in a way that any developer can create their own adapter in the event that an official one doesn't exist. This has the ability to ensure that once their network is launched, it continues to be used for years even as competing platform chains like NEO or Dragon come and go and the landscape around them rapidly grows. You can think of Chainlink a bit like TCP/IP in that regard. The internet has rapidly changed, but we still use TCP/IP as the protocol to move data from point A to point B.
So to get to the point of the post, my case for why you'd be crazy to ignore Chainlink is simple. If you're reading this you're using the internet, and the internet has gone onto become a ubiquitous part of our lives worldwide, representing unimaginable amounts of social and economic value.
Now imagine back in those early days of the internet I mentioned earlier, someone said that the whole value of the internet was going to be cut up into only 1 billion pieces and you could have a slice of that value for less than 60 cents each. Would you have wanted in? Would the risk of a different protocol becoming the standard have deterred you from investing in these internet shares? Or would the prospect of owning a piece of the global network that would go on to move all of the world's data been an opportunity you jumped at when you had it?
That's the opportunity Chainlink presents now. If it fails, it fails. But if it succeeds, it will represent a paradigm shift for the blockchain space that will go on to power the next-gen of dApps and smart contracts and Chainlink will become the internet of the dApp era.
Either way, you no longer have to wonder what it would have been like to watch the internet emerge, because there's a spot open for the internet of the blockchain era, and we'll get to see it within the year. That's an exciting development for blockchains and the world.