Today Hedera announced that Chainlink Labs is the twenty-first member of its governing council, which is dominated by major enterprises. Hedera is a decentralized public network where anyone can build applications, but only nodes operated by governing council members can write to the distributed ledger.
Most of the existing council members are large firms such as IBM, Google, Boeing and Nomura. In contrast, Chainlink is very much a web3 startup. It’s the major oracle provider to many of the highest profile public blockchain projects.
In a centralized world, software programs often use external feeds for data like exchange rates or stock prices. In the decentralized world, blockchains use oracles, which are similar to feeds. Chainlink provides decentralized oracles, which have a twist. Instead of relying on a single data source, most of them rely on multiple sources or nodes to ensure resilience. If a corrupted feed is used by a smart contract that is entirely autonomous, it could have an enormous financial impact.
“As enterprise adoption of distributed ledger technology continues to advance, decentralized oracle solutions become critical for every vertical – from DeFi and insurance, to gaming and NFTs, and more,” said David Post, Managing Director of Business Development and Strategy for Chainlink Labs.
“It is a very natural progression for us to join the Hedera Governing Council and work with the leading enterprise-grade public network and their other Council members to make Chainlink the default oracle provider for enterprise applications.”
As an indication of Chainlink’s popularity in the public blockchain world, it is the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of almost $13 billion. That’s after falling 28% in the last seven days with the cryptocurrency market sell-off. Hedera is in the 58th spot with a market capitalization of $2.1 billion.
Other than Chainlink Labs, the only council members that are not massive enterprises or infrastructures are University College London (UCL) and Swirlds, which owns the intellectual property rights to the technology underpinning Hedera Hashgraph. The network is a hashgraph rather than a blockchain.
Several of the latest governing council additions have a payments focus. Worldpay owner FIS has been on the council for quite a while. But recent joiners are South Africa’s Standard Bank, Australian payments infrastructure eftpos, and Korea’s Shinhan Bank. Shinhan hopes to participate in a future central bank digital currency.
Existing council members are Avery Dennison, Boeing, Dentons, Deutsche Telekom, DLA Piper, EDF, eftpos, FIS, Google, IBM, LG, Magalu, Nomura, Shinhan Bank, Standard Bank, Swirlds, Tata Communications, UCL, WIPRO and Zain.
