Announces whitelist to meet demand for ChainLink sale

Ari Juels, leading cryptography academic and former RSA Chief Scientist, has co-authored and released a technical whitepaper with the team behind SmartContract.com, the leading blockchain middleware provider, used by technical leaders like SWIFT, and enabling smart contracts to securely connect with external data sources and off-chain payment methods. The academically peer-reviewed paper offers new insights into how smart contracts can expand beyond being used as token sale mechanisms, and presents ChainLink, a new approach to securely connecting smart contracts with real world data, any/all APIs and traditional bank payments.

In a related announcement, ChainLink has added Facebook’s Director of Engineering Evan Cheng as an active Technical Advisor. Cheng previously created LLVM, which is relied on by all Apple iOS and Mac devices to run their secure lower level machine code, as well as playing a key role in how secure lower level machine code is run by some of the world’s leading technology companies, including Google, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and many other technical leaders that depend on running secure tamper-proof systems. Cheng received the prestigious ACM Software Systems Award, when LLVM became recognized as a global standard for generating secure low level machine code, enabling the daily use of everything from iPhones to Google search to Nvidia graphics cards.

SmartContract.com and ChainLink CEO Sergey Nazarov said: “We’re lucky to be working with a technical visionary like Evan, his contribution to how low level machine code is able to securely run many of the services we all use today, makes him a valuable authority about how to make decentralized infrastructure that is also highly secure.”

The ChainLink whitepaper was thoroughly researched and peer-reviewed by distinguished computer science professors, cybersecurity experts, and blockchain industry leaders. The research was led by Ari Juels, former Chief Scientist at RSA and currently a widely known professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, as well as a Co-Director of IC3, an initiative of faculty members at Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, UIUC, and Technion. Juels has made notable contributions to the field of cybersecurity and made world-changing contributions to distributed systems research through his well known work on Proof of Retrievability, which leading decentralized systems like Filecoin, Storj and others are heavily based upon. The whitepaper is now available for public review.

Sergey Nazarov said: “We’re thrilled to be working with a truly gifted academic, technical visionary, and overall great person like Ari, his contribution to both the traditional cybersecurity industry, and the newly emerging blockchain infrastructure are truly foundational.

“Building ChainLink upon industry-leading, security-focused research places its approach in the strongest possible position to succeed technically. We expect that peer-reviewed, modular, and open source approaches like the ones laid out in the ChainLink whitepaper will allow us to create the secure and necessary connections between smart contracts and key external resources like data feeds, APIs, and various payment systems.”

As a result of the extremely high demand for participation in the ChainLink token crowdsale, the ChainLink team has carefully created a fair pathway to ensure widespread access. The sale, which will commence September 19, 2017 at 15:00:00 UTC, will abide by a strict whitelisting process that allows for the inclusion of the larger blockchain community, and those interested in supporting a fully decentralized blockchain middleware.

LINK tokens will be used within the ChainLink Network, which lets smart contracts securely access the many off-chain resources necessary to become truly useful for financial, insurance, trade finance, and other mission-critical agreements. The LINK token will give developers the ability to pay each ChainLink Node Operator for the unique data, APIs, and off-chain payment capabilities they provide. This provides a way to securely, quickly, and verifiably connect smart contracts to external data sources, APIs, internal systems, and existing banking infrastructure, all of which they need to become functional for real world use cases.

Sergey Nazarov said: “As ChainLink approaches its crowdsale launch, we would like to thank our supporters for the enormous interest in the LINK sale. The community’s tremendous demand to participate far exceeded our expectations, and we are confident that the LINK token sale will create a solid foundation for the ChainLink Network to become the preferred means of connecting smart contracts to critical data, APIs and traditional bank to bank payments.”

The ChainLink Network makes use of several other open source projects. In the interests of giving back and contributing to the community, ChainLink is being developed in an open source manner.

Sergey Nazarov said: “ChainLink invites and encourages the community to fully review our body of work in both theoretical and technical terms. We are deeply grateful to the academic, cybersecurity, and blockchain communities for all of the rigorous and thoughtful review they’ve already contributed. We’re looking forward to working closely with these communities to create both secure and truly decentralized blockchain middleware for everyone’s immediate use.”

The ChainLink whitepaper is available at https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper.