November 2018 Summaries

At Devcon4 in Prague, CNBC interviewed Sergey Nazarov, the Founder and CEO of Chainlink, about their announcement regarding the acquisition of Cornell's Town Crier technology. This development aims to enhance Chainlink's capabilities by integrating two projects focused on delivering data to smart contracts into a singular, robust project. Sergey expressed his appreciation for Devcon, highlighting the gathering of like-minded individuals dedicated to advancing the practical application of smart contracts, and praised the efforts of the Ethereum team in orchestrating such a collaborative event.

At the 2018 September ETH San Francisco Hackathon, three teams were awarded Chainlink hackathon prizes for their innovative implementations on the Ethereum blockchain. Over a 36-hour period, participants developed blockchain applications, with a range of projects that included political voting, cryptocurrency finance, and service uptime guarantees. The third prize went to B3PO, a system that integrates robotics and blockchain to facilitate absentee voting, created by a team led by Moyukh Sen to help students vote from afar. The second prize was awarded to Link Set, which offers cryptocurrency traders an automated portfolio rebalancing solution, akin to index tracking in traditional finance. The first prize was claimed by Xuefeng Zhu for Micro Subscription, an application that holds cloud providers accountable for service uptime, allowing users to pay only for actual usage. These projects illustrate the diverse potential of applying off-chain data to on-chain smart contracts, highlighting the transformative power of blockchain technology in real-world scenarios.