Agoric and Chainlink Integration Brings Plug’n’Play Oracles to JavaScript Smart Contracts

Agoric is Live on Testnet with Chainlink to Give JavaScript Smart Contract Developers Access to Secure and Reliable Price Data for DeFi

Adding to our existing library of interchangeable, composable DeFi legos, Agoric is excited to announce that Agoric and Chainlink have teamed up to make it easy for smart contract developers to plug oracles into DeFi dapps. The combination makes the Agoric cryptoeconomy a data-rich environment for deploying new DeFi products, giving developers access to any form of market data such as asset prices, FX rates, interest rates, and more.

Using the Cosmos-IBC protocol, the Agoric chain brings composable, reusable, and safe JavaScript smart contracts – what we refer to as DeFi legos – with a new security model to blockchain. Agoric’s platform makes smart contract creation more accessible for developers, requiring fewer lines of code while using a familiar development environment via the world’s most popular programming language.

We selected Chainlink’s market-leading oracle solution because it provides high-quality data from premium off-chain APIs (data aggregators), as well as highly secure and reliable data delivery utilizing both decentralization and security reviewed oracle node operators. This framework ensures that Agoric dapps have access to highly available, accurate, and manipulation-resistant market data to trigger their contract’s execution and securely transfer real world value between users.

Chainlink’s decentralized oracle for the ETH/USD Price Feed, which we can make available to Agoric developers

Chainlink already has the most widely used Price Feed oracles in DeFi, proven to secure billions of dollars of value for live applications. We can use these price feeds to drastically speed up developers’ time to market, as well as leverage their established framework to launch new price feeds and/or completely customizable oracle solutions.

Previous to the Agoric-Chainlink integration, developers needed to build their own price data feeds, which is time-consuming, requires upkeep, and comes with unforeseen security risks due to the many nuanced and overlooked challenges of building a secure oracle solution. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle services take care of all of that so dapp developers can focus on building the best product and user experiences, ushering in a new wave of DeFi.

“Developers can come to Agoric and use their expertise in JavaScript to create novel DeFi applications previously unachievable,” says Agoric CEO Dean Tribble, “By providing developers with high quality data and secure oracles from Chainlink, we are able to accelerate our mission of making smart contract development easier for the huge, untapped JavaScript developer community, without sacrificing on security or reliability.”

Nuts and Bolts of the Chainlink Integration for Devs

Agoric’s integration with Chainlink oracles is already up and running. For testing purposes, we launched an initial dapp on Agoric’s testnet. It provides a simple but general JavaScript API for accessing oracle information from Chainlink. Building with the oracle components in that dapp, JavaScript devs will have immediate and direct access to Chainlink’s oracles, such as price oracles to power new DeFi dapps on the Agoric chain.

This oracle dapp allows paid JSON queries and replies, serviced over WebSocket to an Agoric blockchain edge server (this is the “ag-solo” depicted in the diagram below). This Agoric example oracle contract dapp enables other contracts to query a Chainlink node in exchange for payment. With that as the foundation, the Agoric community will create additional JavaScript APIs (notifiers, async iterators, etc.) and reusable smart contract components, such as aggregations of multiple oracles, price feeds, and external event triggers. An Agoric dapp will be able to reuse any of these building blocks to enable the rapid development of applications that can perceive and obtain information from the world outside the blockchain (off-chain).

“Agoric is making important strides towards providing new smart contract tooling to developers, particularly for the large Javascript community. Chainlink ensures that all smart contract developers building on Agoric have access to accurate data and secure oracles, critical components to building high quality DeFi products across numerous verticals,” says Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink.

Why This Integration Matters

Faster time-to-market: reuse existing, high-quality oracles
Develop DeFi in a data-rich environment
Leverage the Chainlink community’s expertise and dedication to ensure continuing availability of quality oracles
Chainlink developers ready to leverage an existing datasource can now do so in the most extensible, powerful smart contact environment, using familiar tools and language

What’s Ahead

Agoric is working with Chainlink to grow our smart contract capabilities, build out developer tooling, and ensure that dapps have access to Chainlink’s data. This work includes creating useful composition and aggregation of the individual low-level contracts and creating interesting Agoric applications using Chainlink oracles. Stay tuned for future announcements regarding these initiatives.

In addition to working with the Chainlink and Agoric communities, we are regularly signing up new partnerships based on the shared value those relationships create in the ecosystem. And in 2021, Agoric will launch its public chain on mainnet with integrated Chainlink oracles to provide a data-rich JavaScript environment for DeFi applications.

About Agoric

Agoric is developing a secure distributed ocap platform for smart contracts and market-oriented programming. Our platform supports the development of smart contracts and market institutions across many different scales, from large public blockchains to small two-party contracts.

Meet our team, get support, and follow our upcoming news!

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universal smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.

Chainlink is trusted to deliver definitive truth by hundreds of organizations to provide continuous, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link and follow @chainlink on Twitter.