September 2020 Summaries

Chainlink's inaugural SmartCon Summit in 2020 emerged as a pivotal blockchain event, drawing over 8,000 attendees from more than 100 countries and featuring 130+ speakers who discussed the future of decentralized technology and the current state of DeFi. Highlights included the announcement of Dr. Ari Juels leading Chainlink Labs' new research arm, the acquisition of DECO technology for enhanced data confidentiality on public blockchains, and insights into the global coordination in the DeFi sector from leaders like Sergey Nazarov and Andre Cronje. Enterprise adoption of blockchain was underscored by companies like Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom exploring blockchain for data security and new revenue streams, while innovations such as Arbitrum's scaling solution and OpenLaw's smart contracts within Microsoft Office were showcased. The summit underscored growing enthusiasm for decentralized systems, with enterprises and community members alike contributing to the development and adoption of blockchain technology.

Ethereum's increasing popularity due to tokenization, decentralized exchanges (DEXes), and decentralized finance (DeFi) has led to high gas prices, which in turn result in higher transaction costs and longer mining times. This environment makes transactions susceptible to front-running, where traders exploit the order of transactions for profit. This issue is exacerbated by Miner-Extractable Value (MEV), a phenomenon where miners can reorder transactions for maximum gain, leading to systemic unfairness. Chainlink Labs proposes the Fair Sequencing Service (FSS) to mitigate these issues by decentralizing transaction ordering through an oracle network, which sequences transactions based on criteria like time of arrival rather than gas price. FSS aims to ensure fairness in DeFi by leveraging oracle nodes to reorder transactions in a transparent manner, potentially lowering gas costs and preventing front-running. The service is designed to integrate with existing blockchain systems without requiring changes to the base layer, and it supports various ordering policies, including encryption techniques to combat front-running. Despite challenges, FSS aspires to make DeFi a more egalitarian and transparent financial system.