Tezos Becomes Latest Blockchain to Tap Chainlink for Oracle Services

Pricing feed protocol Chainlink has integrated with yet another blockchain, this time Ethereum rival Tezos.

Announced Thursday, Chainlink’s decentralized pricing oracles will provide real-time data for Tezos community projects after teaming up with Smart Chain Arena and Cryptonomic, a pair of independent Tezos developers.

The integration means Tezos projects can pull from active pricing feeds for various assets to build out products, such as the bitcoin-based decentralized finance (DeFi) application recently created by the Bitcoin Association Switzerland.

Pricing oracles like Chainlink provide the infrastructure necessary for scaling digital-asset products, especially in the DeFi space. Digital assets are sold on various secondary markets, making price discovery inherently difficult.

Oracle solutions like Chainlink organize and vet price feeds from on- and off-chain sources to construct a reliable price average. The firm’s oracles have been integrated in various forms into Google, Oracle and SWIFT plus cryptocurrency projects such as bZx, Polkadot and crypto lending giant Celsius Network.

Smart Chain Arena and Cryptonomic are two firms in the greater Tezos ecosystem. The former firm produced the SmartPy language, which will be used for crafting the smart contracts necessary to deploy Chainlink’s oracles.

“We recommend Tezos developers use Chainlink when building smart contracts as Chainlink’s secure decentralized oracle network makes possible a plethora of new use cases across DeFi, Equities, Insurance, and much more,” Cryptonomic co-founder Vishakh said in a statement.

Sergey speaks

Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov told CoinDesk in a phone interview that many firms are switching to contracted oracle solutions due to the inherent difficulties of building a decentralized pricing feed. 

Nazarov said the undertaking is similar to making an entirely new blockchain itself.

“Oracles are like a big onion … [T]he more you dig into them the more layers of problems you discover. There’s a reason they don’t build it into a chain and there’s a reason they don’t encourage people to build their own,” Nazarov said. “It’s because the depth of the problem initially isn’t obvious.”

The integration was sponsored by a grant from the Tezos Foundation, according to a blog post from Cryptonomic. The Tezos Foundation did not return a request for comment by press time.