This weekend was held the Cardano Summit 2021, an event organized by IOHK, the company behind the Cardano project (ADA). On this occasion, many conferences and demos took place. It was also the right time to announce new partnerships to come.
Cardano partners with Chainlink
Since its inception, Chainlink has become the leading decentralized oracle service in the blockchain ecosystem.
After having lent a hand to the developers of Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana or Optimism more recently, it is now Cardano’s turn to benefit from the services offered by Chainlink.
According to the official announcement, developers on Cardano will be able to use real-time data from Chainlink’s oracle in their smart contracts. Initially, this will only concern the market price feed service. However, the other services offered by Chainlink are expected to be deployed at a later stage.
According to Niki Ariyasinghe, head of partnerships at Chainlink, this combination of the 2 projects comes about in part because of the recent rollout of the Alonzo update, which brought smart contracts to Cardano:
“A lot of this comes down to timing. Cardano has obviously gone through a long period of updates, the most recent being Alonzo, which aims to enable smart contracts. So for us, it’s really the right time to engage with the Cardano ecosystem.”
Now, the 2 projects hope that this partnership will allow Cardano to develop a rich DeFi ecosystem and attract “hundreds of billions of dollars” through the various protocols that will compose it.
Despite Chainlink’s aspiration to work with a maximum of different blockchains, this partnership was not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, at the end of 2020, Cardano had unveiled a partnership with the company Wolfram to create a decentralized oracle service.
During a live chat, Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, explained why Wolfram was chosen over Chainlink at that time:
“Because Stephen is a good friend and Wolfram is a great company and Wolfram doesn’t have an army of trolls attacking me on the internet for no particular reason.”
A multitude of partnerships to come
In addition to Chainlink, the Cardano Summit was the occasion to announce many other partnerships aimed at developing the Cardano ecosystem.
Charles Hoskinson also announced a partnership with DISH Telecom. The goal being to improve the adoption of blockchains, while transforming the telecom industry model.
We also learned about partnerships with land restoration and tree planting verification company Veritree, esport platform Rival or decentralized identity solution AID:tech.
Unfortunately, smart contracts are still struggling to take hold on Cardano. Indeed, only 27 contracts have been deployed on Cardano so far. From the announcements, it seems that this slowness is intended by the teams, who want to ensure the compliance of the content of deployed applications.
