An announcement by Optimism, a layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution, claims Chainlink oracles are running live on Optimism. The platform claims that the integration comes following increased demand from its community. It acknowledges that most smart contracts protocols and applications use external oracles in various capacities. In most cases, they are used as price feeds for DeFi to perform the different on-chain actions like settling binary options on expiry and checking loan collateralization. Oracles are only becoming more functional as various projects use them to advance the utility of their on-chain applications.
For this integration, developers on Optimism will have access to the Chainlink’s low-cost price feeds which they will use for quick and secure DeFi building. Chainlink oracles come with assured quality given that it already provides top quality feeds for various blockchain assets, such as cryptocurrencies, indices, commodities and FX rates. It means the developers already have a wide range of feeds to use. The experience in working with multiple assets also means the Chainlink team can easily launch other feeds to support any application.
Chainlink provides feeds that are native to Optimism on Ethereum, which implies that they run at the underlying cost and speed of the platform. It means developers will scale their projects through affordable, low latency updates in real-time. This will in turn unlock a new asset class on Optimism layer 2 which was previously impossible to access on layer 1.
Various DeFi platforms like Uniswap and Synthetix that already run the alpha version of Optimism will gain from the Chainlink feeds. The low-latency and low-cost oracle updates will work best for the user experience on the platforms. The binary options trading at Thales and Synths of Kwenta are some of the applications that will also gain from the integration.
Benefits of using Chainlink price feeds
Integrating the Chainlink price feeds come with multiple benefits, such as;
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Top-quality data
Chainlink price feeds are made up of premium data aggregators which collect information from multiple exchanges. It also vets all the information collected and eliminates any outliers and suspicious data. The information feed from the aggregation model is free from API downtime effects, data manipulation and other attacks.
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Frequent updates
The low latency and low-cost price updates deployed on the Optimism network means they can be used at all times. Therefore, any data that comes from the Chainlink price feed is accurate and reflects the current market conditions.
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Transparent monitoring
Chainlink has a reputation for a robust monitoring system for all its applications. Any developer relying on feeds from the platform can independently verify their real-time and historical price performance feeds.
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Robust infrastructure
Chainlink is run by a network of professional nodes that ensures it’s free from downtimes and tampering during market volatility. It also does not experience infrastructure outages or network congestion.
Bottom Line
Optimism looks to make use of the benefits that come with Chainlink price feeds to create a new wave of innovations. The existing and new DeFi applications will start moving to the platform without changing underlying code. With time, it will also include other Chainlink services like the verifiable random function (VRF) for gaming and NFT Dapps. Chainlink keepers for smart contract automation is another possible future addition.