Summary of Seven Key Points from the Chainlink Smart Contract Summit SmartCon#1

This article is sourced from Chainlink.

The second Smart Contract Summit, SmartCon#1, has successfully concluded. We would like to thank all the speakers and discussion guests at the summit for their wonderful contributions, as well as the enthusiastic support from the Chainlink community. Thank you all for your efforts in making this summit one of the most notable events in the blockchain industry in 2021.

Recently, the second Smart Contract Summit, SmartCon#1, hosted by Chainlink, has successfully concluded. The summit saw participation from over 15,000 attendees from more than 140 countries, who collectively watched over 200 industry-leading founders, researchers, and developers share the most important cutting-edge innovations and collaborations in the blockchain ecosystem.

SmartCon#1 showcased many exciting innovations in the field of smart contracts, including developer speed runs, cutting-edge research on fair transaction ordering, and enterprises venturing into the blockchain space. Additionally, Sergey Nazarov announced the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) in his keynote speech.

This article summarizes the most significant news and standout trends from the summit.

1. Off-chain and Cross-chain Services Provide Next-Generation Tools for dApp Developers

As hybrid smart contracts continue to evolve, developers are increasingly realizing the importance of secure off-chain services in expanding dApp functionality, including verifiable randomness and low-cost automation. SmartCon showcased how the Chainlink network is continuously expanding trust-minimized off-chain computation, including the mainnet launch of Chainlink Keepers, the introduction of Fair Sequencing Services (FSS), and the announcement of the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP):

• Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov announced the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a new open-source standard for achieving interoperability across smart contracts, enabling the transfer of messages/instructions and tokens across chains. The goal is to establish a universal connection between hundreds of public and private chain networks, allowing previously isolated tokens to circulate across all chain ecosystems and create cross-chain applications.
• Chainlink Keepers launched on the mainnet, allowing developers to automate smart contracts securely and reliably based on predefined conditions, eliminating manual processes, enabling advanced dApp use cases, and allowing project teams to focus on core product development.
• Ari Juels, Chief Scientist at Chainlink Labs, explained how the currently developing Chainlink Fair Sequencing Services (FSS) will address the widely discussed Miner Extractable Value (MEV) issue and establish a more economically fair and robust mechanism for blockchain transaction ordering.

2. Global Enterprises Venturing into the Blockchain Industry

This year's SmartCon showcased how some of the world's top enterprises are upgrading their infrastructure to provide valuable data and services to smart contract developers, supporting the development of decentralized applications.

• Google Cloud is collaborating with Chainlink to integrate NOAA weather datasets on Google BigQuery for smart contracts. On-chain parametric insurance can receive reliable weather data from over 9,000 weather stations.
• The AWS Partner Network is working with Chainlink Labs to develop AWS Chainlink Quickstart, a one-click solution that can deploy highly available and secure Chainlink nodes on AWS cloud in just a few minutes.
• Swisscom, a leading telecommunications company in Switzerland, is running its own Chainlink node, further securing Chainlink Data Feeds and providing additional security and decentralization for the most widely used price oracle in the industry.
• The world's largest insurance broker, Marsh, announced a partnership with Chainlink Labs to develop on-chain parametric insurance contracts using Chainlink oracles.

3. Smart Contracts Achieving Positive Social Impact in Financial Inclusion and Environmental Protection

Several speakers discussed how blockchain technology and smart contracts can drive social development and establish a more open, fair, and transparent global economic system.

• In a roundtable discussion on social impact, leaders from exMachina and the GoodDollar social impact project discussed how blockchain technology and Chainlink's decentralized oracles will provide deterministic automated smart contracts with access to high-quality weather and market data to address key issues related to climate change and income inequality.
• Marc Barasch from the Green World Campaign and Martin Wainstein from the Open Earth Foundation (which has received Chainlink community incentive grants) talked about how they will build open-source infrastructure to accurately track carbon emissions using hybrid smart contracts.
• The Treejer protocol, funded by UNESCO, discussed how it uses Chainlink VRF to generate 10,000 verifiable random NFTs, each representing a tree planted in the real world, incentivizing users to provide microloans to farmers in rural areas.
• Seth Goldstein, founder of blockchain startup ZuzLab, and entrepreneur Cemil Türün discussed how digital identity and reputation can help local communities connect economically, reduce the wealth gap, and achieve sustainable development for the local economy.
• Ryan Berkun, CEO of Teller Labs, along with Fan Zhang and Lorenz Breidenbach, discussed how the privacy-preserving oracle protocol DECO for smart contracts can transform data ownership in open digital ecosystems.

4. As DeFi Accelerates, CeFi Platforms are Also Decentralizing

DeFi platforms are rapidly driving applications and innovations, while more and more CeFi platforms are entering the blockchain ecosystem, decentralizing their infrastructure and integrating into DeFi protocols to enhance the reliability, transparency, and yield of financial products.

• Celsius Network, a leading CeFi platform with over $16 billion in digital assets and more than 800,000 users, has integrated Chainlink Price Feeds to determine loan interest rates, marking the first centralized finance platform to issue loans based on a fully decentralized and transparent pricing mechanism.
• Founders of Ampleforth, Frax Finance, Fei Protocol, and TrustToken discussed the future development of stablecoins, including algorithmic stablecoins, reserve-backed stablecoins, and how to use Chainlink Keepers and Proof of Reserve to ensure the autonomy and transparency of protocols.
• Ed Felten, co-founder of Offchain Labs, discussed how the Ethereum Layer-2 protocol Arbitrum enhances network transaction speed and scalability while reducing costs through its flagship rollup chain, Arbitrum One. Arbitrum One has numerous ecosystem partners and is ready to launch its beta version on the mainnet.

5. The Intersection of Gaming and DeFi in the Dynamic NFT Space

Many project leaders in the NFT space attended SmartCon to showcase the latest gaming dApps, including "play-to-earn" NFT applications and multi-platform games using NFTs with embedded DeFi functionalities as game characters. The Chainlink network provides rich oracle functionalities for this wave of blockchain gaming, such as connecting game tokens to off-chain data, generating tamper-proof random numbers for in-game battles, and automatically harvesting game earnings.

• Aleksander Larsen, co-founder of Axie Infinity, demonstrated to the summit audience how the Axie team developed successful "play-to-earn" games and how to leverage the momentum of gaming economics to create a sustainable play-to-earn platform.
• Jesse Johnson, co-founder of Aavegotchi, showcased token-based Aavegotchis, which are dynamic NFTs minted based on tokens borrowed from the Aave protocol, and utilized Chainlink VRF to generate verifiable random numbers, providing players with a fair and verifiable gaming experience.
• Founders of NFT projects and leaders from the large NFT blockchain ecosystem Klaytn discussed innovative models of play-to-earn, various aspects of GameFi, and the entry of dynamic NFTs into the metaverse and mainstream industries.

6. The Development of the Entire Blockchain Ecosystem is Driving Smart Contract Innovation As the multi-chain ecosystem rapidly expands, projects across various layers of the web 3.0 tech stack and different blockchains are jointly exploring new smart contract use cases and enhancing dApp functionalities, including privacy mechanisms and cross-chain development.

• Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at a16z, announced a partnership with Chainlink to invest in the development of a decentralized and censorship-resistant inflation dashboard, providing globally authoritative inflation data with cryptographic signatures. The winner will receive a $100,000 investment from Balaji and a $100,000 investment from the Chainlink Community Grant Program.
• Celsius announced plans to adopt the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) in its yield generation features, allowing securely locked funds on the platform to be transferred to any other blockchain.
• Renowned scholars from the Smart Contract Research Forum, Carnegie Mellon University, and Frankfurt School discussed how to leverage various consensus mechanisms and privacy solutions like zero-knowledge proofs to promote institutional applications of blockchain technology.
• Chainlink and Filecoin launched a joint grant program to incentivize developers to create hybrid smart contracts that connect Chainlink's decentralized oracles with Filecoin's immutable storage system.

7. Growing Demand for Cryptographic Facts

The final takeaway from SmartCon#1 is that Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov briefly described the history of the development of fact-based contracts in his keynote speech, stating that cryptographic facts are far more powerful than mere paper guarantees, as empty promises have repeatedly disappointed us. With more users entering the DeFi ecosystem and more large enterprises beginning to use smart contracts, this demonstrates their application potential.

Over the past three days, many projects and enterprises participated in SmartCon, including DeFi protocols, CeFi platforms, gaming dApps, insurance giants, and leading cloud computing platforms. These projects and enterprises perfectly showcased the interest of various industries in decentralized systems and their desire to obtain cryptographic facts to build a fair and just world.

Join the Chainlink Ecosystem

We would like to thank everyone for their efforts and contributions to SmartCon#1, making this summit a highly anticipated event in the blockchain industry. We appreciate all the speakers, developers, researchers, and attendees who came together to witness the remarkable developments in the industry over the past year. Our success is due to your hard work and dedication.

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