Smart contracts are playing an increasingly important role in the world of blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi). Their realization helps fulfill the central aspiration of Bitcoin and other decentralized blockchain networks, which is to enable people to conduct secure peer-to-peer transactions by eliminating the need for intermediaries such as banks or governments.

In the absence of mediations, the challenge for developers is to find a way to provide smart contracts with the real data they ideally need to interact with so they can execute on more ambitious goals. The data can include information as varied as currency exchange rates, weather conditions and even sports scores.

Chainlink is a decentralized Oracle network that provides this much-needed flow of information for smart contracts running on a variety of blockchains. It aims to make smart contracts a more powerful tool, enabling them to leverage dynamic data input collected from external sources.

This data is very diverse and can range from price feedback, supply chain management data, temperature transmitted by smart sensors, football score, anything relevant to the purpose of a given blockchain.

Chainlink integrates with multiple blockchains simultaneously, providing them with the latest flow of information. It acts not only as a predictor, but also as a predictor aggregator. Chainlink buys information from a number of data providers and connects it to the blockchain.

Chainlink Networks enable blockchain like Ethereum and the decentralized applications (DApps) that run on it to access data, thus enabling communication between the real world and the blockchain. Prophetic machines in the network collect, query, and validate data from thousands of data sources and deliver it to Chainlink, which then feeds dynamic input to smart contracts. All of this contributes to the intellectualization and interconnection of the blockchain ecosystem.

Chainlink is a pioneer in integrating off-chain data with existing smart contracts. Chainlink has built a strong reputation and is already backed by several high-profile players in the blockchain and broader technology space. Among them, huobi, Alpha Vantage and many other data providers have started selling data to Chainlink.

Chainlink is a decentralized open source network that encourages users to run nodes on its network and rewards them in the form of its native token LINK.