Bankless - SotN #45 - Chainlink 2.0 with Chainlink God

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

This is the first piece of Bankless content focusing on Chainlink. Who better to tell us about the decentralized oracle solution than ChainLinkGod himself? State of the Nation is live-streamed on Tuesdays at 11am PT. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 💰 GEMINI | FIAT & CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/go-gemini  🦊 METAMASK | DEFI PASSPORT https://bankless.cc/metamask  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING http://bankless.cc/uniswap  🔀 KWENTA | EXCHANGE SYNTHETIC ASSETS https://bankless.cc/kwenta  ------ 📣 UPSHOT | Become an NFT Appraiser! https://bankless.cc/upshot  ------ Resources: ChainLinkGod on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChainLinkGod?s=20  Chainlink 2.0 Announcement: https://blog.chain.link/chainlink-2-0-lays-foundation-for-adoption-of-hybrid-smart-contracts/  ------ This Week on Bankless: 💪 Bankless DAO (5/4): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/its-time-for-bankless-dao  📈 Market Monday (5/3): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/the-flippening-market-monday  🎙️ The Crypto Renaissance (5/3): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-the-crypto-renaissance-josh-rosenthal  🧢 Weekly Recap (5/1): https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ethereum-bonds-weekly-recap  🗞️ Weekly Rollup (4/30): https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-rollup-eth-all-time-high-eminem  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. We've got crypto prices up. We've got a lot going on in the crypto and defy and Ethereum space. And we've got Chainlink God on the podcast today. This is the episode that we live stream generally on YouTube. It also comes out on the podcast. We dive into one particular topic that has made the headlines recently. Today, the topic is Chainlink 2.1.

Oh, and David, I don't know about you, man, but like, I really want to understand ChainLink. And I want to understand Link the asset. It is being used by many D5 protocols, if not most D5 protocols. And I think we're going to dig into that with ChainLink. God, I didn't ask you how you're doing, though. How are you doing, David? I'm doing just fantastic, casually launched a Dow today. But that's a conversation for a different state of the nation.

And today, like you said, we're all talking all about Chainlink. And this is actually the first piece of content about Chainlink that we've put out on the Bankless podcast and Bankless YouTube. So that's pretty exciting. And we have Chainling God himself, the unofficial, I would say, crypto-Twitter face of Chainlink to come and tell us all about Chainlink 2.0 and how ChainLink 2.0 can improve upon oracles in Ethereum. This is going to be an awesome episode, guys. So stay tuned as well. Before we get into it, David, we've got to talk about what's new in the bankless ecosystem. The first is an announcement that you just alluded to, an announcement that we made on the bankless website, on the bankless newsletter.

And that is bankless the community is officially launching a Dow. David, I remember when I started the newsletter and you and I both started the podcast, we realized, very early that we had a, like quite an incredible mission, right? Like trying to bring, trying to educate the masses on crypto, trying to bring a billion people into the ecosystem and become bankless, empower them with self-sovereign money technology. And from inception, when we started this thing, we knew that it needed to be bigger than just us.

And so we recruited kind of, you know, excellent people on bankless media studio, like Lucas Campbell and others. But even that is not enough to accomplish this vision. So the bankless community for a very long time has been talking about organizing itself, coordinating in a Dow. And so we have an opportunity now to figure out what that looks like. So we are throwing our support behind a Genesis team that has launched an initial distribution for a bankless Dow. And that Dow is aligned with the bankless mission, which is basically. basically to onboard the world to bankless money systems like Ethereum, like Bitcoin, like defy. We're going to play a role in that. I hope that's really up to the bankless community to

decide and now the Dow members. So we'll include some links about that in the show notes, including to a link to the newsletter that I mentioned where we're kind of announcing our support for this thing. But David, it's a big day for the bankless community. I'm super excited that we are decentralizing ourselves. We are essentially giving the entire bankless community full permission to execute on this vision. Because bankless at the end of the day, isn't just a media company. It's not just a podcast, not just the show that you listen to. This is a worldwide movement. So the Dow is an excellent opportunity for you to get involved. Yeah, the best trick we ever pulled was by going through and talking to every single industry expert who's focused.

on the power of tokens, the power of internet-scaled organizations, and the desire to create something new in uncharted lands. And in this process, I've been reminded of our podcast that we did with Jesse Walden, who talked about the Big Tent mentality, our podcasts about Chris Berniske, and also our podcast with Joel Menegrow, and really getting down to the heart of people who are really paying attention to what it means to create digitally-scaled, internet-scaled organizations because I think I can speak for both of us when I said I have no desire of making some like large C-Corp company like that's not what I want I don't want a bajillion employees under bankless LLC I just want to be one part of a broader revolution which is what the bankless

Dow can facilitate and so I'm I've long-lived bankless Dow. Yeah I'm super excited to see where they take it and once again guys there'll be some links in the shit notes for you to get involved and see what's up with that. David, we also have to mention Upshot today. So this is super cool. This is a perk for members of the bankless community as well. I think of Upshot as what they're trying to build is almost like the Zillow of NFTs. So you know how Zillow will evaluate homes and we'll come up with a Zestimate, like a price, what's the value of your home? They're trying to do that with the NFTs. And they are enabling all bankless members who have a badge token to exclusive access to their beta right now for the next

seven days or so before it goes public. So this is me with a bankless badge in my account. I'm signing in. I get exclusive access to this upshot beta. No one else gets this except for the bankless community members. And what can I do here? I can start to appraise NFTs. That means like figure out and answer questions about how valuable they are. So here are some NFTs on Super Rare. And here I am. I can answer questions about these NFTs. I can choose to skip. Which of these NFTs is more valuable. Maybe I think it's this one. Maybe I think it's that one. And the net of this, David, is it's like working for a protocol. So as an NFT appraiser, you get paid by Upshot to do this. Super cool tech here. And we're excited to announce its beta launch to the bankless community with Upshot.

Yeah, the mechanism here is like hot or not, where you are presented with two NFTs. You don't have to, your job isn't to assign a dollar value. Your job is to pick your favorite NFT between the left and the right. So it's actually really kind of like easy. And you don't really have to think too hard about it. I mean, you do need to go and look at like token supply. You go need to go look at the artists. But it's really just like, you know, pick your favorite of the two.

Which one do you think is more valuable? And as there's, and this is kind of like a big data, like, movement, right? All you have to do is input data into the system and get you get rewarded for doing so. And so I think this is a really unique and genius way to get some sort of emergent behavior actually instantiated into, you know, Ethereum and actually dictate what NFTs are valuable, more valuable than others. Guys, another, yet another way that you can work for a protocol today. David, I've got to ask you the question before we get to chain link God that I ask you at the start of every state of the nation. And that is this. What is the state of the nation this week,

my friend? The state of the nation, you actually created this one, Ryan. So tip of the half of you is coordinating. The state of the nation is coordinating. And like many good states of the nations, it means more than one thing. Bankless Dow is being coordinated under a new Dow. And so that's cool. Chainlink is this off-chain data coordination system for getting data onto Ethereum. And really all we are doing when we are talking about crypto economics, talking about tokens, is we are coordinating capital and labor and goals and objectives. And so today's state of the nation, Ryan, is coordinating. Awesome. That sounds awesome. Well, we're really excited to get into this with Chainlink God, but before we do so, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. DOWs have money and they are in need of labor.

If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswop Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. That's exactly what we did to get you.

Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless and you can do the same for your project. Thank you Unoswap for sponsoring bankless. Gemini is the world's most trusted cryptocurrency exchange. I've been a customer of Gemini since I first got into crypto in 2017 and it's been my main exchange of choice to make my crypto buys and sells. Gemini is available in all 50 states and in over 50 countries worldwide and on Gemini there are markets for over 30 various different crypto assets, including many of the hot DeFi tokens. And it's one of the few exchanges, and it's one of the few that has liquid dye markets. Gemini just launched their Earn program where you can earn up to 7.4% interest on 26 various crypto assets. If you're tired of paying fees in Defi or you don't want to worry about

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Check them out at Gemini.com slash go bankless. Guys, welcome back. We've got chain link God here. we are going to talk about all things chain link including the recent chain link 2.0 news figure out what oracles are figure out why chain link is important talk a little bit about link the ass and i've got to admit i'm a little bit of an oracle noob in some respect so i'm hoping chain link god could educate us as well if you don't know who chain link god is are you even on twitter because he is everywhere particularly uh when it comes to the link community he is a voice for the link community and

and has a ton of excellent information about ChainLink, how it works, and is the perfect guest to explore this topic with us today. Chainlink, God, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, guys. Happy to share all the knowledge that I've accumulated about ChainLink over the time. It is great. And I think, like, for me personally, I don't know about you, David,

but like pseudo-anonymous guests are some of my favorite to talk to. Because you guys can say whatever you want, right? That's the beauty of it, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. That's the beauty of the internet as well. You know what? Let's start with actually defining the problem set here. I'm going to like zoom all the way out, Chainlink God, and talk about oracles, the role and the purpose of oracles. I know David alluded to you the ability of Chainlink to bring off-chain data back on chain. Is that the purpose of oracles? Tell us why oracles are necessary, important. useful for this industry. Absolutely. So when you're looking at a blockchain, blockchains are designed to generate a large amount of security,

consensus on like specific transaction types. So transferring tokens, that's what it's defining security around. Blockchains inherently can't connect to external data resources, you know, the price of ether or the weather in San Francisco or any other external resource that doesn't live on the blockchain already. You need some kind of entity, an Oracle to deliver that data on chain so it could be actually consumed by the smart

contracts within that environment. So blockchain miners can't do that themselves because if there wasn't consensus about the data, the entire network would break and that's obviously not ideal. So you want to have a separate Oracle network that relays this data onto the blockchain. And it's critical that you don't just use like a centralized Oracle, some server in someone's basement somewhere because that entirely defeats the purpose of using a decentralized smart contract on a decentralized blockchain if a single entity can just corrupt the execution of that contract. So what you really need is some type of framework for creating these decentralized Oracle networks that fetch a specific data point, maybe the price of Bitcoin

against ether, aggregate it for many sources and then deliver a single data point on chain so that it can actually be consumed. So that's kind of like one example, but really, oracles, it's pretty much just connecting the on-chain world of contracts and connecting that to the off-chain messy world of non-determinism and all this messy data out there. So you can really think of it as like the bridge between those two environments. So let's keep going with some of these easier questions

just to really set the foundation here. So Chainlink God, Uniswap has oracles. Why can't we just use uniswap oracles for everything? That's a good question. So the primary obvious one is that uniswap specifically only gives you like token data, prices of tokens. It's not going to help you if you want to know like the price of like gold somewhere or the weather somewhere or the election results.

But specifically when you hone in on price feeds, there's like four or five key issues of why you can't just use a unyswap time weighted average price. And they're kind of nuanced, but, But the first one in the primary one is that a TWOP feed, which kind of provides in context, you can't just take the spot price from Uniswap because it could easily be manipulated. You need the time weighted average price to prevent that manipulation. But when you take the time weighted price, that data point becomes inaccurate during times of extreme volatility. So really, a TWOP is a lagging indicator that becomes out of sync with the market-wide price

during periods of time when you need accurate data. So it's like this inverse correlation that you really don't want. And so that kind of gets into the security of it, where a TWOP, you can only really increase security if you take a larger time sample. But the larger time sample you take, the more inaccurate it becomes. So if you want to scale security,

you have to decrease accuracy. If you want to increase accuracy, you have to decrease security. That inverse correlation is like, the exact opposite of what you would want for a good price feed. So with Chainlink, it doesn't have that limitation because it's not a T-womp. It takes the volume weighted average price from all of the exchanges around the world, all the decentralized ones, all the centralized ones, aggregates into a single value to get the current spot price and then delivers that on-chain.

If you want to scale security, you can add more nodes. You can add more data sources. You can add more collateral to it. You don't have to trade off some accuracy for your security. And so the third point, the last one I'll hit on, is market coverage. When you take data from a single exchange, you're getting like a tiny sliver view of what the price of an asset is. And that market can become illiquid over time. It could be manipulated, cheaper to attack the entire market-wide price. So Chainlink specifically with its price feeds is designed to generate a market-wide volume-weighted price that accurately reflects the state. of reality about a specific asset price.

So T-WOPs and Uniswap, it's okay if like a token just trades on Uniswap and it just launched, but once it gets more liquid and trading more, you're going to want to upgrade to a chain like feed to get that full coverage and actually scale your security. So there's definitely a lot of nuances there and why I heavily recommend a decentralized Oracle network rather than on-chain T-wop. Right. Yeah. So that's really the nuanced conversation between on-chain data that Ethereum does know, but what you're saying that, you know, even though Ethereum already knows it, a chain-link Oracle system could provide some competitive advantage

versus what you could get naturally on-chain. And that's one conversation. And the other conversation is that Uniswap, like you said, you alluded to, Uniswap doesn't know the weather or the temperature in Argentina, or it doesn't know the outcome of the presidential election of 2020. And so, but why can't we just, you know, everyone knows the outcome of the election. in 2020 or in the other or like the outcome of a world series event. Why can't we just input that and data into into the chain? Why does it need to be this decentralized network? Pitch us on the decentralization side of things.

So when you're looking at an oracle network, what it's fundamentally doing is it's delivering the data a contract needs to execute. And when that contract executes, it's going to be moving a lot of value, you know, upwards of billions of dollars. If you allow anyone to just input that data, then they're just going to put data data that favors them, that doesn't actually represent the state of reality. So if you want to actually generate a strong consensus, you want to take the same approach that blockchains do about transactions, but use that decentralization about data sources, because otherwise you would be relying on a single source of truth, which means it's a single point of failure, which that centralization is the antithesis of what we're trying to get after with smart contracts. So decentralization,

the main goal is to increase the tamper resistance so we can create contracts that secure billions and eventually trillions of dollars that counterparties can't manipulate into their favor like they can today with centralized agreements. So decentralized oracles is the way you get accurate information about the world that can't be manipulated by any single entity or small group of entities. Fainling God, I'm wondering if you might agree with me on this. So I often think that, that the world of public blockchains and crypto defines scalability in a very limited sense. So often when people talk about Bitcoin scalability

or Ethereum scalability, they're only talking about scalability of transactions per second. That is like trustless transactions per second. But there are so many other axes for scalability that are important if we want a truly decentralized permissionless money system. And I just want to just paint this picture for listeners that I think what you're saying, I would agree with you, is that oracles are actually a scalability technology for a couple of reasons. Like one, they allow us to scale to real world off-chain assets,

which is incredible. And maybe you could say more abstractly, off-chain events, which is even a larger aperture for us. So, like, that's an element of scalability. But their scalability is only as good as their level of trustlessness and decentralization, right? Because it would be very easy for us to get some of this price feed data from a trusted provider, say, you know, NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange or something like that. But that is, again, not scaling trustless price feeds is not scaling trustless on-chain data. And that is the true vector of scalability for this entire system. Do you agree with that? And can you talk about that anymore? Do you think that people understand that oracles, specifically trustless oracles, are key in order to scale

permissionless open money networks like Ethereum? Yeah, I would entirely agree. People usually think of like you said, scalability and doing more transactions. But scalability, also applies with how much value is being secured. You know, if you have a very low security Oracle network and you keep increasing the value without scaling your Oracle solution, you know, that contract's going to end up being corrupted eventually anyways. So what you really need is the ability to scale the crypto economic security of not just, you know, the network on which the contract operates, but the Oracle network, which delivers the data to that contract. And if you think of it as a more broad abstract concept, you can think of the combination of oracles and blockchains as scaling the amount of value that humans can create just in general.

So if we want to be able to take over the global economy into a better state where it's not controlled by any single entity, we have to scale not just the transactions per second, but also scale the amount of security that we can actually provide to. to secure these contracts. So that's kind of a large aspect of Chainlink is how do you scale security? Because as the value within contract rises, you need to increase that scalability of security. So Chainlick has various different mechanisms for increasing the node count,

for increasing the amount of data sources, the amount of explicit stake or the amount of implicit incentives, but generally you're scaling security. That's like the primary goal of oracles. So let's get into the details how that's actually done. Chainlink is a crypto economic system. And on bankless, we like crypto economic systems. That's generally how we scale trust minimization and therefore more value

to further and further corners of the globe. So chain link God, can you start us down the path of explaining how chain link is a crypto economic system and how it uses crypto economics to secure data? Sure. So with the crypto economics, there's kind of two different paths you can take. There's the implicit incentives path, which Chainlink has today, and then there's the explicit staking path, which is kind of what was laid out in the white paper. So with the implicit incentives aspect, this is kind of a dynamic that I'm not sure if people fully grasp the power of, where if you look at the network, Chainlink nodes are being paid in and they hold link tokens, and they have a strong financial incentive to uphold the value of those tokens to ensure that their financial

holdings are not devalued and that their future cash flows are not devalued either. So it makes it so it's more profitable to be honest and continue providing real operational work to the network because you want to maintain the value of the tokens you are extremely financially exposed to. So you can kind of look at this dynamic the same way as how Bitcoin and Ethereum does it, where miners are paid in that native token, both the subsidy and the fees paid by users and they want to maintain the value of their holdings and their cash flows in both the tokens they hold and the ASICs and the miners that they hold. And this applies just as much to chain link where nodes want to maintain the value of their link and maintain the ability to use

their link to generate more link in the future. And that gets into the explicit staking aspect where that's where you deliberately deposit your link tokens to a service agreement and it gets slashed. if you do something the service agreement says you weren't supposed to do, if you deviated or you didn't respond, that's a much more direct financial penalty to a specific note who is specifically being malicious. But the implicit incentives is kind of wrapping the whole network to be overall reliable and healthy because there's a financial incentive for everybody within that ecosystem to maintain the value of that token they hold and they will continue to get paid in because they want to continue these cash flows in their revenue. Chainlink, God, I have a quick follow up for you about that implicit incentive. So I see exactly what you're saying, the implicit incentive, right? So somebody's not going to cheat if they are vested in the chain link ecosystem. It hurts their bottom line. It hurts their wallet.

Joey Crew came on the podcast. I'm not sure, maybe some time over the summer from Pantera. He sort of opened my eyes up to this concept. It's basically, I'm going to run this by you. Basically, his argument was, yeah, well, centralized. organizations have the same implicit incentive not to cheat. So let's say you are providing an Oracle service to the blockchain and you to Ethereum, let's say, and you are ESPN, for instance, right? Your implicit incentive is to provide the right score to the chain or else what? Or else

there's reputational risk. There's costs to your shareholders. So if you have any ESPN, you know, stock or equity and a new story comes out that you've been providing misleading data and trying to cheat the system. Stock price goes down. Future cash flows go down. It's the same sort of implicit incentives I feel like you're talking about. And these exist in centralized Oracle providers. Talk to me about that. Aren't we just talking about something that just exists anyway, whether it's decentralized or not, at least on the implicit incentive side? Yeah, that's a good question. And that's something I have considered in the past. I think the key difference is like when you have a centralized corporation, essentialized entity,

they have complete control of over their own operation. But when you have a decentralized network of hundreds to thousands of independent civil-resistant entities, the act of corrupting the network requires an extreme amount of social coordination to actually pull that off. So this implicit incentive, it's kind of each note knows that it's in, their best interest and everybody else's best interest to continue operating the network correctly so they can continue earning these cash flows. And it's not a single entity who can make a single decision to say, yeah, I'm going to be malicious and do this tomorrow.

But you would basically need to majority attack the network. And that honest majority assumption is the same we see for Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that's what secures those networks, is that you have a decentralized network of civil resistant and independent entities. So it's, it has that social coordination friction that kind of prevents this from happening. And that's derived from the, uh, the selfish implicit incentives that each individual note has themselves. So it's a little bit different when you compare it to centralized entities who have complete control over their own operation. And I want to be clear for listeners, because I think we're going to come back to this when we talk about, uh, chain link 2.0,

but the explicit staking incentive that you were talking about, that's not here yet, but that is coming in Chainlink 2.0. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. Very good. All right. Well, you remark that and come back to it later, listeners. So just doing a more, again, setting that foundation is about what Chainlink really is. Let's talk about all of the ecosystem players. Who are all of the, let's talk about every single participant in the Chainlink network, right? So there are data consumers who people who are looking for price feeds or just Oracle feeds, there are Oracle providers, people that are providing this information and staking link. Who else is involved with these systems? And how do they all interoperate with each other?

Yes, you can kind of think of it as like a stack almost. So what you have at the bottom is like the original data itself, wherever that raw data may be. You know, if it's price data, it's all these different thousands of different exchanges. And on the layer top, you have the data providers or more commonly data aggregators, which are professional data aggregation firms whose entire business model is around generating accurate and reliable data about a specific event, a specific piece of data. And you basically like with price feeds, they would provide market coverage. But you can't just trust one data provider because single point of failure. So you have a, you have chain link nodes who are responsible for querying multiple data providers for

specific piece of data like ETHUSD, aggregating that into a single value, but you can't just use a single node. That's a single point of failure. So you need to have a decentralized network where all of these nodes contribute their data into a single data points. And that aggregation happens within that Oracle network, which is one entity. Then they deliver on-chain, which is then consumed by smart contract applications and developers, like the AVE, the synthetics, the D-Y-D-X, all these other financial applications, even the NFTs and whatnot. So it's kind of like a supply chain from the raw data up into the refined data and then the consumers. And then kind of all throughout this entire stack, you have the community of each

individual operator of each piece of infrastructure who is, it's kind of like a well-oiled machine. If one piece doesn't work, the tech stack doesn't work. So it's all kind of integrated with each other and sometimes data providers are the chain link nodes. Sometimes you have different ways that networks are set up where there is just a single data source because it's like a enterprise backend system. So it's kind of like fluid with who these entities are. But you need all of them. Otherwise you don't have an Oracle network of any use to anyone. I see. So that was going to be sort of my follow-up question because I think the picture you're painting is very clear in my head about kind of this layered stack of different service providers. My question is kind of like maybe you

partially answered that. Where does the chain link network start and where does it end off? So obviously, let's say at the bottom layer, the price providers, the exchanges, they're not part of the chain link network necessarily. You also talked about this aggregator layer of the stack. I'm not sure if they're part of the chain link network, but certainly the nodes on the network are that are providing the feed to the chain. Then you have consumers on the top that probably aren't part of the chain link network. Is it mainly the nodes or are sometimes the aggregators part of what you might call the chain link network? That's a good question. So by default, every chain link node is a part of the chain link network. That's kind of what it means to run a chain link node. We have data aggregators and sometimes

they're a part of the network because they run their own chain link node and directly. deliver their signed API with their private key, other times they're outside of the ecosystem. Chainlink can support both types of data providers. And when you get to like even the exchange data, most exchanges are just exchanges, but we see things like Cracken who actually run their own chain link node and are directly delivering their data onto Ethereum so it can be consumed. So it's kind of optional if you want to be in the chain like ecosystem or not or in the chain link protocol. chain link can leverage data whether you're running a node or you're not. So it's kind of like a blur.

Right now, it's mainly those node operators, but as it becomes painfully clear that monetizing the growth of the defy is very profitable, we're going to see more of those data providers and even more of those exchanges, running their own chain link node and directly selling their data to smart contracts through chain link infrastructure. So it's kind of like a, it's a bit, it's kind of blurry. Like there's no fine line to it, really. So Coinbase publishes their own oracles.

about price feeds. And I think what you're saying or what you could argue is that, well, they could just continue to do exactly what they're already doing, but they could all, they could integrate with the chain link protocol and issue their, their price feeds through chain link. And in that case, chain link would be like a distributor of, uh, coinbase's oracles, coinbase's price feeds. And actually, in, in theory, according to the, the, the arguments from, from chain link, Coinbase almost has no reason not to. They're already doing this. Why don't they just get paid for it from the chain link system? Right.

And in theory, like the bull case for Chainlink is that, well, everyone will just follow this path. Do you have any, you want to add anything onto that before I go on to the next question? I would say with Coinbase, they're not, they call it an Oracle, but it's not really an Oracle. It's a signed API connection. It doesn't actually deliver the data on chain. You still need an Oracle network for that. But when you think of like all of these entities who want to deliver the data on chain, chain link's just an easy solution to make that point.

possible, and you'll still want an Oracle network to aggregate for many sources. So it's an obvious way to monetize your APIs and generate more revenue. Like, it's a no-brainer for these providers. So Chainlink, maybe we could talk about like just the number and specific or in specific applications on Ethereum. There's a lot of defy apps that consume Chainlink oracles. Let's name off some of the big ones if you could. And also, are they paying the ChainLink system for that information?

and talk about the flow of the link token throughout the system. Right. So there's a lot of different types of applications that are using Chainlink. Like the larger ones we see is like Ave, a decentralized money market where you can lend and borrow the tokens. You can see synthetic assets like synthetics where you can mint representations like gold or oil or even like Tesla stock and S&P 500. You have like decentralized derivatives like DYDX.

You have various NFT platforms pretty much. any type of application that needs external data resources is using ChainLink already or will be using Chainlink. So when we're looking at the usage of the link token, each user within the ChainLick network, if they're using ChainLick price feeds, that means they're a sponsor, and that means they're paying some portion of the fees. But a kind of an important nuance is that chain like the primary offering from ChainLink, it's like a shared cost model. If there's, if somebody needs ETHUSD, there's just one ETHUSD fee, and there's about like 30 users and they're all pooling their fees together,

meaning each user is not paying the full costs. They're only paying a fraction of the total costs. And then you add the network subsidies on top of that. So it makes chain link by far the most cost effective solution because users are never paying the full costs. And so all of this link being paid by users and by the subsidy goes into the Oracle network and then gets paid to the nodes for their services. So it's kind of this reference feed model.

is like at the core of the economics of price feeds, you also have something like VRF, where contracts need to specifically acquire link to then pay a chain link node to get verifiable randomness into their application. That's like a request and receive model, while a price feed is a continuously updated resource that you could just query at any time in a single transaction.

So that's kind of like the different flows of link. But generally, it's paying for Oracle services, and then eventually with explicit staking, collateralizing those Oracle services for those users. I want to bring Bankless listeners back to another mental model that we've talked about so often on bankless. You named a whole bunch of different DeFi protocols that use ChainLink, and this is because so many systems need price feeds.

One of the formulas we've talked about before is basically if you have some store of value asset, something that's valuable, tokenized on chain, and you add an Oracle, you can create a synthetic, any kind of synthetic. It's like price feed plus collateral equals anything. Tesla stock, Apple stock, like, you know, the price of the apartment that David's in right now, like anything can be created in this combination. And so we're seeing this explosion of all of these synthetic assets on defy and all of them

need price feed oracles. But I want to make sure I understand sort of the cash flow component here. When you were talking like, say, an AVE that is a consumer of this price feed data, they're paying the chain link protocol in link tokens. Is that correct? So they're actually like they're consumers of all of these various price feeds and they need link in order to pay for them. Right. So with each price feed, each price feed has a specific contract associated with with it and that contract needs to be funded with Link. And every time an update is produced, that contract allocates a link payment

to each node operator for their service. So the contract effectively needs to be pre-funded by Link and that's pre-funded by the network subsidies and by the link used by users to fund that specific contract. The request to receive model is a bit more direct. You don't pre-fund anything. You just pay the link directly to the node and then you get your data back in a later transaction.

But this reference feed, contract model is like a pre-funding mechanism so that you can get like assurance that you're going to be getting data for as long as that contract continues to hold link in it. And anybody can put a link into it. But the users are have the strong incentive to ensure that they still have access to this data and they pay in order to access this data. So I think we're going to get into link token economics a little bit, but I just want to make sure I understand. So is that a source of link demand on the system? Right. You can kind of think of it as, like Ethereum. If you want to make Ethereum transactions, you need to acquire ETH somehow from somewhere.

And same with Chainlink. If you want to use Chainlink services, you need to acquire Link from somewhere to pay the operators for their services. So this is Link acting as a medium of exchange, unit of account, kind of a money inside the ChainLink system. Is that correct? Exactly. It's like the money of the Oracle economy. You could think of it as. So if Chainlink is actually pushing data on chain, how does it actually enforce people to pay for that? Why can't applications just go and find that? If it's published somewhere on chain, how is the enforcement of link payment actually enforced? Rather than just like some application going and finding the data that was published. That one's a bit more of a tricky one because once you put data on a blockchain,

anybody can see it, anybody can access it from off chain. So really it comes down to incentives. If you are a protocol with $10 billion in user funds and you feel like you're just, going to be free loading data, you're providing no assurances to your users. That contract can shut down at any time because you're provided zero guarantees for services. But if you're a direct consumer who is paying, you have a very strong service guarantee that the user funds within that contract are going to be protected because you're going to continue receiving data for that. And there's different methods you could use commit and reveal schemes, but it gets a little more more tricky with like siphoning contracts. So really it comes down to those incentives.

that large protocols securing a lot of value need guarantees. They're not going to be having these shoddy weak feeds that may or may not exist tomorrow. Who knows who really cares? They do care because user funds are at risk. So it's a small price to pay because of this shared price model. Each user's paying very little. And each user wants these guarantees that they're going to receive this data. So it comes down to those economic incentives.

But does that make it an opt-in system? As in like if you want that data to be secure, you better be paying for it. And if you don't pay for it, then it might be insecure. Is that the model? Essentially, you would want to pay to get guarantees that you're going to be receiving data today and into the future. And there's models of the contract where you have to be specifically whitelisted in order to be added to it. And some contracts use that model.

But that one has different considerations because a blockchain is very public. You know, you can't really get around that unless you're using. privacy solutions like Chainlinks Deco with zero knowledge proofs. That makes it much easier to just completely avoid this problem because you never reveal the data. You only have a zero knowledge proof proving something about data without actually revealing the data. So that's like the long term approach to these Oracle networks is not even revealing the data, just allowing the data to be used to generate some computation and then posting the computation on chain.

And that can never be freeloaded because it's never revealed to anyone. Right. That makes sense because I'm just reminded. of like the classic moloch problem, right, where there are 10 fishermen around a lake and they're all overfishing the lake. And so they all need to make an agreement to be responsible and only fish 70%. But then that one person is like, well, I'll let everyone else pay for it. You know, I'll let everyone else take the costs, but I'll over fish, right? I won't pay the chain link oracle with link tokens. I'll just consume the data and I'll let everyone else pay for it. If everyone else follows that same pattern, then actually no one actually pays for anything and then everything

crumbles apart, but it sounds like that that's been addressed. Right. It's those economic incentives and then this layering of additional cryptographic mechanisms to actually prevent this entirely. So it's like it's going to take a multi-layered approach just because blockchains are so inherently transparent. But yeah, it's kind of one of those nuances of having an Oracle network. And it's kind of minimized by like it's not going to cost the users very much to consume

this data because they're one of like eventually hundreds to thousands of users consuming that data. David, there's always that one fish. that screws it up for everyone. Always that one goddamn instrument. Am I right? Yeah. His name's Molok, by the way.

So Chainlink Guide, so when we talk about the appetite for data on the blockchain, on Ethereum, I know it's voracious, right? More data, please, because we want more assets, because more assets equals more equity and these are liquidity-eating machines, how do people, consumers signal to ChainLink, Oracle that they want a new data source. So if I want some price feed for, let's say, a sports event or a new asset, how does that get communicated to the chain link network in order to service and spin up that new price feed? So there's a couple different approaches.

When you look at like the chain link protocol itself, it's not a single monolithic network. It's actually like a framework for building independent heterogeneous networks. and anybody can launch their own node. Anybody can build an Oracle network consisting of whatever nodes that they choose. So they can coordinate all this activity on their own if they want to just get this data immediately. And there's also kind of like how the Ethereum has the Ethereum Foundation,

Chainlink has Chainlink Labs, and they will help projects bootstrap these Oracle networks because they have a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience and actually getting these networks up and running. But given that ChainLink's inherently a permissionless protocol, If you want data, you can get it on chain. There's the tools available to you as a developer through existing nodes by launching your own node or using any combination of the two. So it's essentially you can bootstrap it however you need, but really you would be communicating with the node operators of the network.

If there's existing node operators you know are reliable and you want in your Oracle network, you can communicate to them and say, hey, I want to get the game score of this specific event on this specific day and you can coordinate and pay them for that services because it's like a peer to peer economy. You know, it's direct supply and demand. There's no central coordinator because there is no central network. It's all these independent networks that self-coordinate to generate specific pieces of data. Just so I'm understanding the full picture here. So those Oracle providers, they're getting paid link, but their costs to run an Oracle service are what? Is it basically like infrastructure costs, aggregation costs, and then also, say, on the case of Ethereum, eth gas costs? Is that what comes out of their profits, essentially?

Yeah, there's a couple of capital costs. There's the cost of running the server itself, which is not very much because we're not doing proof of work or any hash computation. There's the cost of purchasing API subscription to like premium data sources, so you can actually get that. And those have different models yearly or per call access. and the primary one, especially for Ethereum, is the gas costs actually paying for the fees to get data on-chain. And that's kind of, as Ethereum gets more and more adopted, that becomes more of a glaring issue. So recently, Chainlink released a scalability upgrade called Off-Chain Reporting, which essentially moved the aggregation of data, move that from on-chain, and move that off-chain,

which basically reduces the amount of gas that's consumed by up to 90%. So that dramatically lowered the capital costs of needing to pay for gas for Oracle nodes. And so as these networks become more efficient, those gas costs get lower and lower and lower because those are the primary costs right now. It's just an unfortunate state, but it'll be solved over time as E2 comes out as more projects begin transitioning to layer two networks like optimism, stockware arbitram, and maybe other side chains. But essentially, chain link is such a large consumer.

consumer of gas because there's hundreds of price feeds and hundreds of data feeds on Ethereum that need to be updated continuously. Maybe some are updated every 0.5% deviation threshold, which means if the price moves, 0.5% an on-chain update is published. And OCR dramatically lowered the cost of that by basically batching node responses into a single transaction. But you're never going to escape paying for gas fees if you're trying to put data onto Ethereum. What you can do is use this shared cost model where you have many users paying for a single feed. And so it's like an economies of scale effect. But I would definitely say the gas policy is the primary one. Those following on YouTube, we have Euth gas station up. Chainlink is the 13th largest consumer,

$105,000 today in the last 30 days, USD value. And node operators are paying that amount, right? Yeah, that's being paid by node operators to post-date on-chain, specifically by the transmitter in each OCR feed. So that would be like a million dollars without OCR, which would be ridiculous. So more improvements are definitely to come in that regard. And so that's kind of where link comes into play. You have to compensate these nodes. If they weren't compensated, they would never pay $100,000 a day to put data on chain.

There's no economic reason not to if they're not being paid. Chain link, God, I want to get into the topic of chain link as a chain agnostic problem. But first, I want to tie off this conversation about how data comes to Ethereum. And different kinds of data has different, like, value ascribed to it. And I think the TLDR is to how different types of data have different value is if an attacker can corrupt the data, how much value can they extract from that attack, right? Like, and so different types of data will have different amount of attackable surface area to it. So how does chain link the network scale up and down security to make sure that each different type of data, each different Oracle, is appropriately secure? so that an attacker can't attack the Oracle and present a fake data and fake price feed or fake just truth

about the world and be able to capture or steal or attack some value as a result of that fake reporting. How does Chainlink make sure that all types of data is secure? Right. That's kind of like the goal. You want to get the cost of attack to be much higher than the cost of reward and that reward is the total value locked of each protocol consuming that data. So there's like a kind of a litany of different things you can implement, You can increase the number of nodes within a network, increasing the social coordination issue of trying to corrupt a network. You can use more expensive and highly reputable nodes that have more future revenue at stake that they could lose if they were malicious. You could increase the number of data sources, so you have a broader view of what you're looking at.

You can use more expensive and premium data sources, which provide higher guarantees of uptime and accuracy. you can even do more implicit incentive size where you pay the Oracle nodes greater amount of link because that increases their opportunity cost of being malicious because they're not going to want to lose that future revenue. And there's also like cryptographic methods with Deco which uses zero knowledge proofs and Town Cryer, which uses trusted execution environments where the oracles can't manipulate the data even if they wanted to. It's kind of like this black box environment that enforces correct relaying of data. And then the final one, and that's the one everyone's excited for, is explicit staking. You can have nodes lock up more link tokens, which creates a directly higher opportunity cost of being malicious because they would get slashed for that link.

So you can use any of these parameters. It's kind of like a dashboard or you can fine tune all the top dials. So if your network is securing only $1,000, you probably don't need that many nodes. Maybe five is enough for that. But if you're securing a billion dollars, well, you're going to need much more. You're going to need 30, 50, 100. You're going to have to keep scaling that up more nodes and more data sources. So it's all fine-tuned for each network.

And so how does competition come into play here? Because from my mental model of crypto-economics is that competition is always at the heart of them, right? So if there is a lot at stake, there should be, in theory, a lot of revenue to be made for honest behavior, right? If you are reporting honestly, crypto economics should compensate you. And if there's a lot at stake, like there's the like $12 billion locked in Ave, therefore there should be a lot of revenue coming out of Avey

into the chain link system because of how much is at stake there. So if you are reporting price feeds into AVEA, I believe according to my mental of crypto model of crypto economics, there should be a lot of revenue being passed between AVE and Chainlink. So how does that work? And how does, is there just simply more revenue to be made for reporting on more valuable data feeds? So there's kind of a different dynamic when the amount of value in like Avey increases and they can pay more fees to the Oracle network.

And as more protocols start using that network and pay more fees, those fees can either just be given to the node increasing the revenue or a more practical approach is using those increased fees to onboard more nodes. and onboard more data sources. So as the fees increase, your securities, the security of the network increases proportionally. And more aggregate revenue, right? Yeah, exactly. And so like the individual revenue from each node may be static, but the network is continuing to grow over time. And it's like a free market economy.

Each node is competing with each other, provide the best services at the lowest cost. So let's get into the conversation of chain agnosticism, because this is something I'm particularly curious about. and I don't actually know the answer to this is where does chain link actually live? So that's kind of two aspects of that question. There's the protocol and then there's the token. So with the protocol, chain link node software is inherently blockchain agnostic. You can run a chain link node to deliver data to Ethereum, to BSC, to polygon, any network,

and that has no cross-dependency of any of the blockchain. So something like BSC, yeah, it's extremely centralized, but it's a lot faster. meaning chain link feeds on that network can be a lot faster and a lot cheaper. And so you can essentially natively integrate chain link into any layer one blockchain or any layer two blockchain without a dependence on any other network. So Ethereum is the most used. That's where DFI pretty much lives. But you can have these native integrations on other chains.

And we already see a bunch of different integrations across like StarC wire, HecoX, IBSC, all these different networks. And then the other aspect is the token. So if you're running a chain link network on BSC, you can't you could pay link on Ethereum, but that's not practical. What you can use is a token bridge where you lock up link token on Ethereum into a contract and then mint a representation of it on another network and you can transact using that representation. You can burn it and get that original link on Ethereum OG version back. So it's all the economic value is essentially on Ethereum being collateralized and it's being distributed out into these other networks, kind of like a commercial bank does to these other networks. So it's, you would essentially allow chain link networks on other networks to pay and to operate at the native speed of whatever that network is.

And Ethereum is kind of like the home base, like the headquarters of where things come back. So all of the chain link clients, they are blockchain agnostic because they'll put data wherever they'll be received. but the token has final settlement on Ethereum, right? So there is some sort of homage that ChainLink does play to specifically Ethereum to the exclusion of all other chains. And yeah, pretty much you could think of like Ethereum as like the final settlement layer. If, you know, if you do crazy thought experiment, Ethereum somehow fails, don't see that happening. You know, have to prepare for the worst situation. You could redeploy the link contract on another chain with the same owners.

and if social consensus agrees, that's the correct version. That's the new settlement layer for Link. I don't think that's going to happen, but if it needs to happen, it could happen, essentially. It's just using Ethereum is the most secure network, so it's the most obvious solution. That perfect answer. Love it. So Chainlink got it. I want to go into a little bit more details about ChainLink 2.0 and also the future of ChainLink.

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is to actually get into the conversation of Chainlink 2.0 because this brand new Chainlink white paper was recently released. And it's got some cool new cryptography, crypto economics baked into it, and kind of a brand new design of the ChainLink system. And so ChainLink God, I kind of want to hand it to you.

What would you say is like the big new thing in Chainlink 2.0? So I would say the big thing is that oracles are usually seen as like a data delivery mechanism. That's their primary use. But this white paper basically presents a vision of how oracles can also provide off-chain computation to scale existing blockchains, provide privacy, order fairness, and basically extend the ability of blockchains to provide value and create what's basically, basically, basically called hybrid smart contracts where you combine both the on-chain code of a contract with an off-chain Oracle network, and you can basically have the code living in both environments.

So you can have settlement on the blockchain with transparent code and interacting with private keys, and then an Oracle network to provide computation, and then that can sync back to the main chain using a layer two mechanism. So it's really this new infrastructure of how an Oracle works and a new definition of what it means to be a decentralized oracle network. It's not just data delivery. It's everything a blockchain doesn't provide. So it's like it's the other half of the puzzle piece

completing the God protocol as it's so put. So the really nice thing, the nice mental model I have about chain links and oracles in general is like it's the radar antenna for a blockchain, right? Blockchains only know about themselves when they need an Oracle system to understand what is true about the world around them. But really just to go into as good a detail as we really can about this,

maybe you can explain what was missing or lacking in Chainlink, the OG 1.0 chain link, and what is now here with Chainlink 2.0? What can Chainlink 2.90 do that Chainlink 1.0 can't do? So the primary thing is you can almost think of it as like a layer two because these Oracle networks, these Dons, the new version as are called, can store state kind of like a layer two, but it's not a generalized layer two.

It's like an application specific layer two. It just specifically grabs the price of ETH and then does computation of contracts that need that price of ETH off chain in this layer two environment and then settles back onto the main chain that could be like a roll-up or a validityam or whatever the protocol.

So it's kind of like it's not just a delivery mechanism of like a middleware communication, bi-directional. It's actually like doing the computation of a large portion of the contract off-loading the work of a blockchain but then using the blockchain as like a security anchor, providing guardrails and final settlement for these agreements that are executing off-chain.

So that's like the primary difference that chain link doesn't do today. It doesn't hold state of, you know, the state of a contract is just delivering data. But with dons, they can actually hold the state of specific agreements. And each Don network can store the state of different contracts and interact with other dons to get data. So it's like a complete reimagining of what it means, what the role of an Oracle is in the ecosystem. So, you know, we talked earlier about Oracle's being sort of one dimension of scalability. What you're talking about here is kind of expanding that scalability that something like Chainlink is providing to off-chain computation. Can you talk about why on-chain computation is a constraint for chains today?

And I do understand it as a constraint. So for instance, Ethereum, even with ETH 2.0, it is sort of sharding out this data layer. And there's going to be a lot more space from a data perspective. But on-chain computation is still going to be fairly scarce. So can you talk about the general problem that chains have doing on-chain computation, and how this could be offloaded, what pain point it solves for chains like Ethereum? Sure. So we have a blockchain like Ethereum has tens of thousands of nodes.

It's very redundant computation. And that's great for settlement. But you don't necessarily need that redundancy for every individual small interaction of a contract. So ultimately, doing everything on the layer one is extremely expensive. It's going to take a lot of gas. The more complex things you do, the more expensive it gets. And there's also other things where, you know, a blockchain is inherently transparent. and doesn't provide privacy.

So if you want privacy of some specific piece of your contract logic, you're going to have to put that off-chain, and that off-chain can be a dawn, so it can grab the data it needs, compute on it, and then deliver a final settlement result, which is secured by the blockchain. So it's like you're minimizing how much work you need to do in this decentralized network

and using it as the base layer of trust settlement layer while doing things much cheaper, much faster, and in a private way, and with other benefits like order fairness prevent MEV, and doing that all off-chain, which can basically provide the best of both worlds. You get the security of the blockchain, and you get the scalability and the privacy of off-chain systems

in the form of Oracle networks. And that's combined together into a hybrid smart contract. So basically, oracles, they help any aspect that a blockchain is not necessarily great at. And that's currently scalability and privacy for the main parts. Let's go into the subject matter of what the computational requirements for being a chain-like node operator entails. So if they are storing state, does that mean that they are downloading and hosting data? And do they need to host that data forever?

And also, like, what are the computational requirements? Like, Ethereum Proof-Stake has very strong commitments to just being able to be done on a regular consumer laptop. Like, what does a—what's the hardware requirements for a chain-link node? Right. So there's no specific like defined value because a blockchain, all the nodes need to have the same requirements because it's one network. With chain link, all these different networks, some may have very low requirements. Some may have like extremely high data like data warehouse requirements. It kind of depends on what you want. So storing data, a dawn, a big difference here is that it actually has a ledger, but it's not a standalone ledger. It's a ledger that's specifically anchored to a main chain. So it's really more like a layer. two in that aspect. And that ledger can be persistent. It can continue to exist or it can just be temporary. Maybe it's only needed for a week and then it's discarded because it's no longer needed. It's kind of like on-demand basis. What do you actually need? Do you need really low hardware requirements? Great. You can create a Don for that. If you're okay with more like a Slana EOS model,

BSC, you can do super warehouse Don network model. It's kind of whatever you would want to do for your Don network. So it's generally like hardware requirements today are extremely low because there isn't computation that regard. But once it's doing computation, there is just an infinite spectrum of how much you want to do. Chainleg God, you keep using this term dawn. What is Don? I should explain that. That's just an acronym for decentralized Oracle network. That kind of just defines this new Oracle network model. My understanding is kind of pods, right? Like each Dawn is its own kind of character. Is that right? You can kind of think of it as like you have a field and each flower is an independent Don network. Like they're not attached to each other.

They each independent entities. So like the chain like network is not a network. It's actually a network of networks. It's like a collection of all these networks. They don't necessarily have any dependencies on each other. Each dawn, each network can do its own service, have its own service parameters of how it's supposed to do that service. So it's kind of like that ultimate heterogeneous design, design.

a network exactly as you needed to. So speaking of the different kind of tiers of network, and you said this is sort of a network of networks design, my understanding of the white paper is there's like sort of the, you know, the default network as well. And also this backstop, it's almost like there's a two-tier oracle system. And that backstop provides more additional security to sort of the frontline oracles. I'm not sure if I'm getting that correct.

But can you talk about this and how would you articulate this design? Right, yeah. So what Ryan's referring to is the explicit staking mechanism that uses a two-tier Oracle network where you have a default tier that's low cost, very high throughput, maybe a little bit more centralized. That's just continuously generating reports. Then you have the second tier backstop Oracle network, which is higher cost, more decentralized, uses maybe the most reliable networks in the nodes that have the largest opportunity cost

lose. And so when you combine these two where the second layer basically resolves the dispute of the first layer, what that means is that you only need to pay the costs of the first tier, but you get the security of the second tier because it's like it's secured by the credible threat of arbitration. It's like getting threatened to being sent to the principal's office. You're not going to fuck up because you know you're going to get punished when you get there. So this second tier security basically allows the chain link networks dons to scale without, compromising on the security that they provide users. Well, the principal's office has a third tier, and that was always my parents when I got home.

It's tiers all the way down. My one question is, are these two tiers differentiated by Link at all? Or is there something else that differentiates this, how you find yourself in one tier or another? So the first tier, that's where nodes explicitly lock a blink, and they lock that into contracts. And any node in that network can raise an alert. And an alert gets determined by the second tier network. And if it's determined like an Oracle report was false, they slash that stake. That second tier network is directly secured by nodes who own a large amount of link.

They get paid a large amount of link. They have a large opportunity cost for being malicious. So if you wanted to corrupt that network, you would effectively have to 51% attack the entire chain link network. because each second tier note is heavily financially exposed to link. And if they falsely resolve a dispute, they're going to basically destroy the trust of the chain like network, destroying the value of their holdings and destroying the value of any future revenue they would earn and they could have earned into the future. So in that regard, it's kind of those implicit incentives that fall back to like what

Bitcoin and Ethereum has, where Bitcoin miners don't explicitly stake anything, but they do get paid in Bitcoin and they own ASIC equipment, which is like future Bitcoin. So they care about the proper operation of the protocol in the same way with the chain like second tier. They're the ones who have the most skin in the game. And when a dispute only appears like once a month, it's an obvious choice. Do I want to keep making money? Yes or no.

And the obvious choice for any knows is going to be yes. If it is no, well, you have the whole social coordination friction issue that's mixed and practical. So really the key differentiator is that the first tier network can really be any node. The second tier network would be specifically the most reliable nodes with the most skin in the game. That would be like the core differentiator. So both would own link, but the first tier would explicitly stake. The second tier would have heavy financial exposure. Wait, so both tiers stake link, right?

The first tier explicitly stakes in a service agreement, which can be slashed. And then the second tier network wouldn't explicitly stake, but they would be the most reliable nodes. So they have link staked in other networks, which means they're heavily financially exposed to the value of the link token. And they're heavily exposed to the future revenue that they would generate. So it's that second tier that determines when the first tier would get their slash staped. So it's like a backstop security mechanism. When would they receive revenue? When would the second tier, the more powerful tier?

When do they receive revenue from the first tier? So they would receive revenue if a dispute is called, then they get paid for resolving that dispute. But these second tier nodes would be the most reliable chain link nodes. So they would be generating revenue in other networks as first tier notes. So they would be generating revenue from both the disputes that the arbitrage, they take over every so often. And then they have the revenue that generate from all the other Oracle networks that they participate in. So if you're a second tier node, are you also by definition a first- first tier node two?

Not necessarily in the same network. You don't have to be. Not necessarily the network. Okay. Right. It could be like a mix and match. They could be. Maybe they're not.

It's kind of whatever the data requester wants to define for their model. They could just use lower quality medium nodes for the first tier and then high quality nodes for the back tier. So they don't have to pay these backstop nodes like almost never because they're never called into dispute because the first tier network knows if they fuck up, then they're going to get their slash staked by the. the second tier who have way more exposure to the network than they do. So I'm kind of giving like getting like a Supreme Court slash Supreme Court versus, I don't know,

whatever the most state level courts or city level courts, right? Where every like if things don't go well at the city or state level courts, the things get escalated to like, you know, state level or federal level courts, right? That seems to be the mental model that is arising in my head. What my question is is what prevents all. of the second-tier stakers from colluding amongst themselves? Because if, you know, the second-tier stakers, second-tier nodes, are checking the first-tier nodes, who's checking the second-tier nodes? So the second-tier nodes, they would have an extremely strong financial incentive to correctly

resolve these disputes, because if they corrupt a dispute, then the confidence in the chain-leg network falls, and that directly affects the value of the link that they're heavily financially exposed to. And because they were malicious, they would forfeit all of the future revenue, and because they're the most reputable and the most used networks, the most used nodes in the network, that would be an extreme cost for them. And kind of in addition to this implicit incentives, which we see the same thing in Bitcoin and Ethereum, there's also cryptographic methods like Deco. You can use a zero-knowledge proof to prove whether a first-tier node accurately relayed a data from a data source. So you don't even necessarily have to trust the second tier if you just use a zero knowledge

proof to prove something from a data source, which is supposed to be the data that was delivered. Zero knowledge proofs are a little bit of expensive to generate. So you don't necessarily do that for every first report. You don't do that if there's a dispute and then you pay those costs. And the second tier node has a strong incentive not to manipulate the dispute, but even if they wanted to, they couldn't if there was a cryptographic proof backing it. So, chain link god we talked earlier in the episode that there was you know added to the crypto economics and chain link v2 is this sort of explicit slashing mechanism uh can you explain that is that the main change and how does that impact the the use cases for link as an asset yeah so that explicit staking

that's what basically what the first tier network would be doing if you would serve as a network you would have to lock up link. And if you're honest, you would get that link back. If you're dishonest according to the service agreement, you would be slashed and given to the alerting note of who said you were doing something wrong. So when you add explicit staking to link, it dramatically evolves like the economics of the link token. Because right now, you can kind of think of it almost like a parallel to Ethereum.

Ethereum or Ether right now is being used to pay for fees. But with proof of stake, you're going to have to lock that up in order to secure the network. And so you're using that as a store of value to collateralize the network. In the same vein with ChainLink, users not only today you do acquire link to pay for services, but once nodes have to explicitly stake, they also have to acquire link to lock up and stay competitive with other nodes who are also locking up their link and trying to provide the most economic guarantees. So it kind of evolves ChainLink from being specifically like a meeting exchange utility token to now also a store of value token,

value token that earns you for future cash flows. It's like link is the right to generate revenue in the chain link network. And that's, you kind of think of it as like almost like a tokenized ASIC in a way where it's staked link is future link. So it's a dramatic evolution of how link would be valued and how link would be used within the network. So that's kind of why a lot of people are excited in it because it gives a lot more utility and a lot more like direct financial value. You're directly collateralizing a contract and that amount of security you can provide depends on the price of Link and depends on how much Link is staked. So it's like a dramatic evolution in the tokenomics of Link. So another mental model that bankless listeners are familiar with is something we talk

about often, which is there are three asset superclasses. One is a capital asset and that's something that produces revenue for you in the future, an asset like property, for example. There's also a commodity that could be used to create something else. So it's used as almost a consumption good. And then there's a store of value. I think you're making the argument that Link is being embedded with characteristics that kind of span these classes, if I'm not mistaken. So if you own Link and stake it, you're using it as sort of a store of value collateral within the system. Right.

And of course, in Link 1.0, it was used as almost a consumption good because if you are a consumer of Link price feed oracles, you need Link in order to pay for those goods. And then it's a capital asset in one way. If you are staking link, you know, you have the right to receive future link, I suppose, supply. So would you say it fits across all three of those asset superclasses? Yeah, I would definitely say so. It's consumable. Like you said, in the sense, you're converting a link token into data oracle services that you need. It's a store of value because it needs to collateralize the value of the protocols it secures. And it's also a right to cash flows from the data being collateralized.

So it's very like Ethereum and it's like a final form for ether. It's very similar. And it's entirely complimentary. Ether and Link kind of boost the growth of each other. So they each have these kind of, they will have these common similar economic properties once the full token economic models are fully fleshed out for each one. So ChainLink God, look, we've been recording this podcast. Link is at all time highs right now. I don't know if that's a coincidence or not. First time you bet on the podcast and no idea. but there's a market cap of almost $20 billion. Why is ChainLink and Link the token specifically worth $20 billion? And because you're pseudo-anonymous, I know you can give us an honest answer.

I think a lot of people, a lot of the value in crypto and space in general, it's heavily driven on narratives. And people see ChainLink securing Defi. They see Defi, depending on what metric you look at, over a billion dollars. and they know that the whole ecosystem is going to grow to secure trillions of dollars. So people see $20 billion, and they see that relatively as being almost a steal because the amount of value that chain link is going to end up collateralizing and it's going to end up securing, it's going to pale in comparison to what it's going to need to be at in order to

secure the data running the global economy. So that's kind of like the thesis that people have. The entire space runs on narratives. And so if you think of Bitcoin as digital gold, ether as like the global computer, and Link as like the collateral of data or just the data economy, it's kind of those three trio that people see as like the blue chips of what run the cryptocosum ecosystem. The group that propagates the narrative, of course, is the social layer behind any project or any asset in this space. And I think the chain link community has a really unique social layer in that you are represented as a green frog on this podcast.

And there are like literal armies of green frogs that are advocates of of link if you go anywhere on Twitter. In fact, I think my co-host has had some battles with the green frogs off and on over the years. Can you explain the community? When we had Vance Spencer on from Framework Ventures, he sort of described this is sort of a bottom-up community in some ways who were really rallying around the price and narrative of Link the asset. What do you make of this? Like how do you explain the green frogs in the Link community? Who are these people?

So it's, you know, the Link community, it's a broad diversity of people. And it's kind of hard to tell because it's all the same color green. but really the community kind of originally formulated on 4chan on the business and finance board. That's where like the community really like the seed was planted. And it kind of grew from there. And it really transitioned mostly to Twitter, but the memes in the approach of what I think of as like trial through fire, where you just completely rip something apart to get down to the first principles,

find out why something has value, why it needs to exist. And then you can work your way back up. And so people may see the community is maybe a little bit, more abrasive in that sense, but that's because they're incredibly passionate. And I think if your project doesn't have some type of maximalist energy or some like group maximus to it, it probably doesn't have that much value to it anyways if people aren't that passionate about it. So our community, like it's a whole spectrum from people who just focus on, you know, creating memes and they're more non-technical cheerleaders and they support the project in their way. And then you have more of like

the educational academic types who want to create better oracles. You have people in, and defy who know oracles need to exist to secure the ecosystem. And so they kind of, you know, it's kind of like a spectrum. When you're in the link community, you're in the link community, but you're also kind of in the Ethereum community. And you're kind of in the defy community. And you're kind of in the Bitcoin community even. Like it's the lines are a little bit blurry.

But when you focus in on like the core community, those are the people who've been following the project since like 2017, 2018. And they had the vision of what oracles could be used for long before Chain Lake really existed at all. So it's kind of everybody's rattling behind the vision of creating smart contracts that can actually make the world better, that can actually improve the quality of life for people and how people go about advocating it while they have their own unique ways. I think the memes are the most efficient form of communication. And that's why the chain of the community is latched on so much as it did because the memes really catch on. So what would you say to the criticism that at maturity, this industry, crypto economic systems, Bitcoin, a theory.

all these projects, they need to ultimately manifest themselves in the real world. And they need to make real world change. And at some point, it needs to be, you know, there's nothing against being like pseudo-anonymous in this space, but only having anonymous people, and I'm not saying that is what, I'm not saying that is classified by what Chainlink is more than just anonymous green frogs, right? but I would I would expect that over time as the system become more integrated with the rest of the world there becomes just a more typical community behind these systems and if chain link does want to mature into its final form it actually will need to migrate away from the green frogs into

a more typical community however you want to characterize that what would you how would you respond to that chain link god I think I don't think it would like transition but every community that grows in popularity, inevitably gets diluted by normies who just see the narrative. So that's just kind of like a natural progression that we will see. I think that the community is important for like this initial grassroots raising awareness. But I think once enterprises and you know, the prime customers, they will see smart contracts. They will see how they can cut their profit margins or increase it by 10, 20 percent. And they're not going to care of green flogs like it or don't like it. They want the cost savings.

They want the advantages. So I think, like, we have a lot of green frogs, but then we also have, like, the ecosystem companies, chain link labs, link pool, reputation dot link, all these different companies who are like integration partners who help projects get chain linked. And then the chain link community kind of raises awareness about what work is actually being done. So inevitably over time, you'll see less frogs, not because there's less of them, but because they got diluted by everybody else who joined and who are anonymous

because they don't know the history. They don't know the background of why there are so many frogs. They just, they like the project. So I think that's inevitable for any project. It'll probably happen for Chainlink. I think the core community will always stay this way generally, but it's definitely going to get more diversified in that aspect. I think personally conversations like the one that you are having with us just now,

Chainlink God, are really helpful. And it's not, you know, about peeling to Normies, but I have had the impression on Twitter before that there is kind of like almost a mob mentality with the link community where if you say something against Link and maybe I'm venturing into that with this last statement now, I don't know, but prepare yourself for the mob to latch on you. And it's less intelligent arguments and more just like memes and like, you know, refutes and it almost shit throwing. And it almost feels like you're being swarmed by bots.

This conversation is so much different than that. You have given us like an articulation of, you know, both chain link in the past, the need for oracles, chain link in the future, also the value proposition for link the asset. Quite frankly, that's the type of conversation that I think is really helpful for continuing to propagate link. And we're just glad you spent the time to join us on bankless and tell the community more about it. So thank you, chain link, God. Yeah, of course. I'm happy to spread knowledge. People have their unique ways of sharing their passion. Maybe it's not always the most effective, but everybody has their methods. And I think sharing this information, getting it out to the Ethereum and just crypto community, I think it's going to help a lot of people. So I appreciate you guys having me on here. Well, it's certainly gotten you this far. It's gotten linked the project to $20 billion. And of course, Link is Chain Link Oracles are powering much of this space. So thanks a lot for coming on. Guys, risks and disclos. Of course, defy is risky.

ETH is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.