The team at Chainlink (LINK), the leading decentralized Oracle Network provider, has published a whitepaper titled, Chainlink 2.0: Next Steps in the Evolution of Decentralized Oracle Networks.
Released on April 15, 2021, the paper notes that the team has a vision for the “evolution” of Chainlink beyond its initial conception (as explained in the original Chainlink whitepaper).
The paper’s authors stated:
“We foresee an increasingly expansive role for oracle networks, one in which they complement and enhance existing and new blockchains by providing fast, reliable, and confidentiality-preserving universal connectivity and off-chain computation for smart contracts.”
They added that the foundation of their plan is what they refer to as Decentralized Oracle Networks (DONs). As explained in the paper, a DON is “a network maintained by a committee of Chainlink nodes.” It supports “any of an unlimited range of oracle functions chosen for deployment by the committee,” the paper noted.
The researchers also mentioned that a DON serves as a “powerful” abstraction layer, providing interfaces for smart contracts “to extensive off-chain resources and highly efficient yet decentralized off-chain computing resources within the DON itself.”
With DONs as a “springboard,” Chainlink intends to primarily focus on key advances in seven areas:
- Hybrid smart contracts: Offering “a powerful, general framework for augmenting existing smart contract capabilities by securely composing on-chain and off-chain computing resources into what we call hybrid smart contracts”
- Abstracting away complexity: Presenting developers and users “with simple functionality eliminates the need for familiarity with complex underlying protocols and system boundaries.”
- Scaling: “Ensuring that oracle services achieve the latencies and throughputs demanded by high-performance decentralized systems.”
- Confidentiality: “Enabling next-generation systems that combine blockchains’ innate transparency with strong new confidentiality protections for sensitive data.”
- Order-fairness for transactions: “Supporting transaction sequencing in ways that are fair for end-users and prevent front-running and other attacks by bots and exploitative miners.”
- Trust-minimization: “Creating a highly trustworthy layer of support for smart contracts and other oracle-dependent systems by means of decentralization, strong anchoring in high-security blockchains, cryptographic techniques, and cryptoeconomic guarantees.”
- Incentive-based (cryptoeconomic) security: “Rigorously designing and robustly deploying mechanisms that ensure nodes in DONs have strong economic incentives to behave reliably and correctly, even in the face of well-resourced adversaries.”
The paper’s authors added that they “present preliminary and ongoing innovations by the Chainlink community in each of these areas, providing a picture of the broadening and increasingly powerful capabilities planned for the Chainlink network.”
You can check out the complete Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper here.