Is Chainlink The One 'Ring' To Rule Them All?

In this article, I take a deep dive into Chainlink and blockchain protocols, and explain why I think Chainlink is the greatest asymmetric risk/reward investment of our lifetime. Introduction It is said that Mordor’s fiery pits have been glowing red for decades, slowly but surely churning out a storm of such evil and destruction that words fail to describe them. A storm of epic proportions. A storm that is headed our way. No one truly knows where the eye of the storm will hit, or where it will strike first, but one thing is for certain - it is coming. The storm I reference is the great financial storm of our lifetimes. A storm caused by decades of horrible monetary policy, corruption, and greed that have led to a world with $200 trillion in debt, and no reasonable way out. The Great Reset, some are calling it. How bad will it be? When will it happen? To be fair, no one knows. However, whereas Sauron’s ring was the one ring to rule them all and the root of all evil, Chainlink is the one token to rule them all, and the root of all truth. The vast majority of Americans no longer trust our global and financial overlords, and many of us have been driven towards a more decentralized future. A future where we no longer have to rely on banks and governments to do the right thing because, spoiler alert - history tells us that they probably won’t. This has given rise to open, decentralized, and trustless forms of digital currency and applications that cut out the middleman, i.e. banks and governments, and in turn, give us more control of our financial futures. In this article, I make an attempt at explaining not only the value proposition of blockchain protocols, but more importantly, how smart contract technologies combined with Chainlink have the potential to quell the great storm headed our way, change how we do business at the DNA level, rebuild our financial infrastructure from the ground up, and kick off the start of the 4th Industrial Revolution. In order to help your understanding of Chainlink, I’ll briefly touch on what a blockchain is, and what came before it: Bitcoin and Ethereum. Part 1: Blockchain, Bitcoin, and Ethereum Blockchain In order to explain any of this properly, it’s important to understand what a blockchain is. So what exactly is a blockchain, in laymen’s terms? Wikipedia’s definition of a blockchain is good, but slightly complex if you are a newcomer: “A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and oftentimes public, digital ledger consisting of records called blocks that is used to record transactions across many computers so that any involved block cannot be altered retroactively, without the alteration of all subsequent blocks.” A blockchain is a global computer network with the responsibility of exchanging value between one or more parties in a decentralized, distributed, and non-custodial manner. Blockchain utilizes an immutable ledger, which is simply a record of all transactions that took place, allowing anyone in the world to verify the transactions as valid. A blockchain is nothing more than a series of consecutive blocks, and these blocks store the transactions that took place over a certain period of time throughout the world. From there these transactions are cryptographically strung together to form an endless chain of blocks that could literally go on forever. Each block contains a unique hash that points back to the previous block, so if there were any attempt to manipulate a block (such as a malicious hacker trying to change how much Bitcoin they actually own), it would become immediately apparent to all network participants. When most people hear about blockchain, they think that there is only one blockchain out there, but that is simply not the case. There are hundreds or maybe even thousands of different blockchains out there today. It’s important to understand the difference between centralized and non-centralized systems when talking about blockchains. In a centralized system, you have a central intermediary such as a bank that helps facilitate transactions between parties. However, one of the major reasons for blockchains to exist is to decentralize the transactions between parties, and effectively cut out the middleman. By cutting out the middleman, this unleashes a host of benefits such as a decrease in costs and an increase in speed and efficiency. This also prevents any kind of nefarious activity from the central intermediary such as manipulating, censoring, or selling your data for profit. Bitcoin Back in 2008/2009, Bitcoin was born. It was the first of its kind. Never before had someone successfully created a fully decentralized cryptocurrency and blockchain network that actually gained traction throughout the world. For Bitcoin, each block consists of the last 10 minutes of all the transactions that happened throughout the world such as people buying, selling, or trading Bitcoin. Due to the decentralized nature of blockchain, there is a necessity for a consensus algorithm in order to help the network reach an agreement on the state of the distributed ledger. Bitcoin uses what is called a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm, which is the original consensus algorithm in a blockchain network In order to “chain” a block to the Bitcoin blockchain and verify the transactions such as Alice sending 5 Bitcoin to Bob, or Carol sending Bitcoins to Dave, these blocks are mined by supercomputers throughout the world that race to solve a cryptographic puzzle defined by Bitcoin’s code. If they win the race, they are awarded in new Bitcoin. Every 4 years, the amount of Bitcoin the miners are awarded is cut in half. This introduces digital scarcity, literally simulating gold in that the more gold you mine, the less there is and the harder it is to acquire new gold. Currently there are 18.5 million Bitcoins that have been mined and are out there in the wild today, but the code states that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in existence in the future. The last Bitcoin won’t be mined until the middle of next century, and this is all based on Bitcoin’s code. This mining mechanism is slightly complex, but serves various purposes that are crucial for the network to run properly. Miners help secure and validate transactions within the blocks. There needs to be some sort of incentivization method for miners to want to mine at all, and that is why there is a reward in Bitcoin for solving the cryptographic puzzle. The distributed nature of blockchain comes into play in that these blockchains are distributed across the world to different nodes, which are simply computers connected to the internet. These nodes store the entire history of the blockchain, and every node has the same exact copy of the blockchain as everyone else. Compared to some of the other blockchain networks that exist today, Bitcoin is an extremely simple network with limited functionality. A benefit of this, however, is that the simplicity of the network provides for a high degree of security. By adding more moving parts and complexity to a network, you open up more opportunities for malicious actors to exploit some element of the code. Due to the fact that Bitcoin was the first blockchain network ever created and is simple and highly secure, institutional investors have felt comfortable using Bitcoin as a store of wealth. The downside of this however is that you have limited functionality of what the Bitcoin network can actually do outside of buying, selling, and storing value in Bitcoin, and this is where Ethereum comes in. Ethereum Several years after Bitcoin was released to the world, a new blockchain platform came around, inspired by Bitcoin’s success — Ethereum. Ethereum was and is nothing like Bitcoin. It created a blockchain platform that facilitates the creation of smart contracts, or decentralized applications, on top of it. Ethereum can be thought of like Google, in that it is a platform that consists of nothing but computer code that defines what are called smart contracts. From this code, anyone in the world can build applications on top of Ethereum. The primary difference between Google and Ethereum though, is that Ethereum is decentralized, and it uses blockchain technology. As we speak, we are currently transitioning to the internet 3.0. The internet 1.0 was when the internet was created, but was very basic. You could browse the web, write emails and chat with others, but that was about it. We are currently in phase 2.0. Phase 2.0 is where users can generate content and do many more advanced things using platforms like Google and Facebook. Social networks, mobile friendly applications, and cloud-driven computing and storage were some of the major developments here. Internet 3.0 will fully integrate blockchain technology and existing legacy systems such as banks, data centers, and APIs to the internet itself. With this, we could literally rebuild our financial infrastructure from the ground up on. One area where enormous innovation and value is being created is by a large wave of decentralized applications that are being built on Ethereum in a sector called decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi is building some extremely exciting decentralized applications that you can use today. With DeFi, there are no banks, you are the bank. It cuts out the middleman altogether, and gives you complete control of your money and financial future. These applications provide features such as providing high yields, lending and borrowing, purchasing, investing, trading, and storing wealth, to name a few. One of the biggest problems with today’s software is that they are oftentimes built within silos, meaning the code doesn’t play well with other applications. This is a major issue in the tech world as data is the new oil, and right now there are vast amounts of data stored in these siloed systems that are not being used or leveraged in any way. Additionally, most of the code used in our traditional financial and infrastructure systems such as banks are proprietary and closed off from the public. You can’t see the code so you can’t tell exactly what it is doing behind the scenes. With Ethereum based DeFi apps, everything is open source, so anyone can go in and view the code. Even better, you can build your new DeFi app to plug into someone else’s. They are literally calling it money legos. These applications can all build off of one another to make some giant magical decentralized application, within the combined parts being greater than the individual parts. Virtually every major institution, tech company, and organization is involved at some level with blockchain technology right now. Just look at some of the major players on the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance below, and this barely scratches the surface of who is all on the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Part 2: The Current Value Capture of Hardware, Protocols, and Applications Switching gears, I want to briefly touch on how the internet works as we know it today. The internet is made up of thousands of protocols that define how it runs. For example, web browsing has its own protocol, email has its own protocol, and video chat has its own protocol. These protocols have no inherent value, they just exist to help the internet run. We all can recognize certain web protocols such as HTTP, since we use them in the browser daily when we go to search for something on Google. They serve a function, and they do it well, but they don’t capture any value. In other words, you can’t invest or make money off of these protocols like you can with blockchain protocols. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple then came along and built applications on top of these protocols, and in doing so, captured a significant amount of value with the applications that they built that are used by billions of people throughout the world. In short, the applications, not the protocols, took all the credit and therefore siphoned off all of the money and value throughout the world. It’s no secret that the applications behind these massive companies, as well as the hardware from companies like Apple and Microsoft, have made them enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, the network protocols powering them barely even received a participation trophy. I touch more on this later, but blockchain protocols have effectively figured out how to flip this paradigm on its head. There will be many future applications built on top of these blockchain protocols, but the value won’t be captured at the application level. Instead, it will be captured at the protocol level. Imagine if the HTTP protocol was tokenized, captured value, and you invested in at it’s inception… Part 3: Smart Contracts Smart contracts are fully automated, tamper-proof, censorship resistant, and self executing digital agreements that aim to replace all agreements and contracts as they exist today. Smart contracts sit on top of the Ethereum blockchain, are written in Ethereum’s programming language called Solidity, and provide a customized set of logic that anyone can deploy to the blockchain without any change to the underlying blockchain itself. One example of a smart contract would be crop insurance for farmers. If a farmer had a bad year due to a drought or other inclement weather, a smart contract could read from data sources that contain weather data, and could then pay the farmer out based on the terms of the digital agreement. This works for many other insurance types as well to include flight insurance, car insurance, home insurance, health insurance, and even marine insurance. For a deep dive into the use cases of smart contracts coupled with Chainlink's oracles, check out Chainlink's called 77 Smart Contract use Cases Enabled By Chainlink. blog Ethereum smart contracts with Chainlink go far beyond the scope of just insurance. They include real estate, identity, voting, gaming, financial markets, legal agreements, cybersecurity, supply chain, etc. The list is quite literally endless. Part 4: Decentralized Applications A decentralized application is essentially a smart contract connected to a user facing website that users can interact with on the internet just as we do today. The user facing website can consist of a simple HTML/JSS and Javascript front-end, or it can use a Javascript library or framework. React tends to be one of the most popular front-ends for decentralized applications. You can check out a basic decentralized application that I created if you'd be interested in learning more about what it takes to create an app on Ethereum. here From this image, we can see that Ethereum operates at the base layer of the protocol stack. Everything above it is a decentralized application that utilizes a smart contract, with varying layers and functionalities. In order to interact with these decentralized applications, you can’t simply browse to the website and start clicking around, however. There needs to be some sort of special gateway between the browser and the underlying blockchain that stores the decentralized application. Currently, the most popular method to do this is through an application called Metamask. Metamask is a browser based cryptocurrency wallet that stores your funds, but also allows you to use those funds for interacting with the Ethereum and DeFi applications. Part 5: Blockchain Limitations and the Oracle Problem So this all sounds pretty cool doesn’t it? Well what is the catch then and why hasn’t this reached mainstream adoption? For one thing, these blockchain and smart contract technologies are still quite new, all things considered. This is some extremely complex and next level stuff. There is no standard playbook for how to properly build out any of these technologies. Additionally, if you don’t know what you are doing, you could easily get hacked and lose all of your funds or even worse, your customers/user’s funds. One of the biggest problems right now in blockchain is the scaling issue. Ethereum can only process around 15 transactions per second, and this includes all transactions that happen throughout the world. Ethereum is a network that is shared globally, so everyone around the world who wants to use Ethereum has to fight to get their transactions in. These transactions cost money in the form of the Eth token, and when the network is congested, the transactions can be quite expensive. When you compare Ethereum to something like the Visa network with around 10,000 transactions per second, you realize we have a bit of an issue if we want this thing to scale. The most serious problem though right now in my opinion is the interoperability problem. Blockchains and smart contracts right now can’t natively communicate with the outside world. In order for a smart contract to function, it requires data inputs from outside of the blockchain that it operates in. This wasn’t exactly a design flaw, however. It was, and is, a feature of blockchain. This feature greatly improves the security of blockchain and smart contracts, but the problem still remains — if they can’t communicate properly and securely to the outside world, blockchains and more specifically, smart contracts, become virtually useless. This is a huge problem called “the oracle problem”. Part 6: Chainlink Chainlink was created by the company SmartContract, who’s CEO is a man called Sergey Nazarov. Sergey has been building in the smart contract space before Ethereum was even created. He has quickly rosen to rockstar status in the blockchain and smart contract community, and has become a keynote speaker for many of the biggest blockchain events out there due to his extensive knowledge of smart contracts, oracles, and why the world needs them. Chainlink’s confusing official definition is that it is a protocol and a framework for building out decentralized oracle networks. Chainlink is not actually a blockchain at all. It is a specific type of technology known as blockchain middleware. For decades, many technology experts believed that the oracle problem could never actually be solved. This is where Chainlink comes in. Chainlink solves this by being oracle network from the blockchain to the outside world. This is similar to your computer connecting to the internet. Without an internet connection, your computer is fairly limited in it's usefulness and functionality. Chainlink's oracle network is the internet connection for the blockchain to the outside world. It connects any data input out there to the blockchain, whether that be data from the banks, an API, or some large database. This includes any data source from our current legacy systems that power all global finance, technology, commerce, and trade. In the future, these data inputs will likely all be connected to the blockchain in some way or another, all facilitated by Chainlink’s oracle networks. Additionally, this process works in reverse. Chainlink allows for blockchains to speak to the outside world in an extremely secure and tamper-proof way. To summarize this flow of data in the image above, you have data inputs out there in the wild such as weather data, web data, stocks and price feed data (to name a few) that are aggregated from multiple sources into a single source of truth by the Chainlink network. This provides a highly trustworthy and reliable set of data inputs that a smart contract can read from and use to interact with other blockchain networks or blockchain applications. From there, these blockchain networks or applications can provide outputs to another smart contract that utilizes the Chainlink network to interact with business entities such as financial institutions. Chainlink isn't just stopping at connecting blockchains to the outside world. Their team, consisting of some of the smartest researchers and engineers are working on many other ground breaking . Trusted execution environments, threshold signatures, data and price feed aggregation layers, decentralized identity, verifiably random functions, privacy features, and so much more. technologies There are better articles out there that explain the complex inner workings and technologies behind Chainlink, so if you are interested in learning more, I recommend you check out SmartContent’s amazing on the topic, or Chainlink’s own beginner guide . blog article Part 7: The Value of Chainlink So what value does Chainlink even bring? Well, it opens up an entirely new world of trust. Smart contracts, and more specifically Chainlink, can be thought of as a definitive source of truth that can’t be tampered with, can’t be controlled, and can’t be censored. Trust is arguably the most powerful economic force in the world, and in a world where truth and trust are severely lacking, a definitive source of truth is in dire need. In today’s world, we place significant trust in financial and institutional brands such as banks and insurance companies. This form of trust in what are called brand based contractual guarantees is based off of little more than the fact that the company or institution behind the brand has been around for decades, and has remained solvent. The major glaring issue today with brand based contractual guarantees however is that what if one side of the contractual agreement decides not to abide by the terms of the agreement? The other party loses, sometimes big, and often they are left with no legal recourse or ability to do anything about it. One can only imagine how many countless times this has happened throughout history. We saw this with Hurricane Katrina, where insurance companies refused to pay out for the billions in dollars of damage that was done to people’s homes and communities. Additionally, there is no guarantee that that brand will be around or remain solvent forever, especially in today’s turbulent times and shaky economy. The alternative to this is to place our trust into math based contractual guarantees where counterparty risk is low, interest yields are high, and security is built-in. Smart contracts coupled with Chainlink’s oracle technologies provide those math based contractual guarantees for contracts and agreements. This is no small statement, as contracts and agreements power all global trade and commerce, and to reiterate, trust is arguably the most powerful economic force in the world. Smart contracts’ tamper-proof, self-executing, and fully automated digital nature are starting to sound pretty good, aren’t they? They guarantee that the terms of the agreement will be carried out due to the math based contractual guarantees. This will not only increase faith and trust in our financial, legal, and business dealings, but it will lead to massive cost savings. Chainlink has a huge and growing of partners and collaborators, and it is quickly becoming the global standard for oracle frameworks. Some of their main collaborations include Google, Oracle, and SWIFT. ecosystem Central Banks around the world are cryptocurrencies as a viable method for everyday use, which could potentially replace the U.S. dollar as we know it with it's digital equivalent called a stablecoin. eyeballing Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to the value of the dollar, and are always worth a dollar, eliminating the volatility that we’ve seen with other cryptocurrencies. Why would the Central Banks be so interested in this technology though? Well, I believe it comes down to the fact that by the very nature of blockchain technology, cryptocurrency and stablecoins would create the perfect audit trail. No more under the table deals or cash payments. Governments would be able to track every single penny, transacted by anyone, and anywhere. As of the other day, January 5th, another major announcement was made by the OCC, which that banks could legally work with blockchain technologies and conduct payments using stablecoins with its customers. stated Chainlink's oracle technologies are not only being looked at by banks as the global standard oracle technology for their blockchain infrastructure, but Chainlink would be non-negotiable for any of it to work. Additionally, Chainlink is the de facto oracle solution for the vast majority of DeFi applications. The Chainlink network is already being used to secure billions of dollars of value within DeFi, and this value has been reflected in the massive growth of the token from 13 cents back in 2017 to a peak of $26 dollars in early 2021. DeFi is growing rapidly and has $25 billion dollars locked into the smart contracts within those DeFi applications. However, when you compare that $25 billion to the total value locked into all cryptocurrencies out there which is around $1 trillion, DeFi has significant room for growth. To name a few of the other enterprise and academic research working groups that Chainlink is heavily involved in are the Baseline Protocol, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the Interwork Alliance, Hyperledger Avalon, the Blockchain Service Network, and the IC3 (Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts). Below is an image of the IC3 foundation. Notice Chainlink tucked in there at the middle? That is no accident. If you dig deep and know where to look, you can find research papers and ties to oracle technologies from Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Intel, many large banks, central banks, governments, the DoD, major insurance companies, and more. On top of this, Chainlink has no real competitors. They were building in this space before Ethereum was even developed, so they have first mover advantage similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum. They have virtually a complete monopoly on the oracle space, and some seriously big brained people behind it’s production and development. As I mentioned earlier, companies like Google built their platform and applications on top of the protocols that power the internet, and siphoned off all of the value. Chainlink flips this paradigm on its head and, since it is a blockchain protocol, captures all of the value at the protocol layer, within the token itself. Part 8: Why Is There a Token? So why do we even need a token? Things get a little tricky here, but bare with me. Blockchains like Ethereum require a token because they are by their very nature decentralized. There isn’t some large company like Google with endless budgets that can just spin up some large data center and store all of the data and infrastructure there. Networks such as Ethereum and Chainlink have to rely on the community to host nodes and manage Ethereum transactions. Tokens are in some sense a way to bootstrap the network and to incentivize people throughout the world to host a node which manage transactions and secures the network. To truly understand how this works, you need to dive into the world of . game theory The Chainlink token itself is used to secure and power the Chainlink network, and the token is where all of the value will be captured. The token is used as a form of payment for entities that want to leverage the Chainlink network. It is also used as collateral for organizations or companies that want to use smart contracts for their business dealings. Oracles actually exist in our traditional and legacy systems today, but they aren't decentralized. They exist as a data input from a single source. This doesn't cut it for smart contracts because that single data input could be manipulated or modified by hackers. When you have a smart contract that self-executes based on a data input or output, this creates a massive security hole. Think about it this way. If an entity is going to leverage a smart contract that is fully automated and self executing based off of some input or data source out there in the wild, they would want guarantees that that data source is 100% correct and tamper-proof. If it wasn’t, it would destroy the entire use case for smart contracts interacting with the outside world altogether. Chainlink provides those decentralized oracle networks for fetching data from the outside world to the blockchain and vice versa, all while being virtually 100% reliable, tamper-proof, and truthful. Once again, how they do this is rather complex, but there are many great articles out there they can explain this much better than I do. Just know that Chainlink has it handled. In the rare event that Chainlink’s inputs were somehow not reliable, those companies using smart contracts that could potentially have billions of dollars locked up in the contract, would want a guarantee that they wouldn’t lose all of their money in the event that the data inputs were wrong. Therefore, the operators who run Chainlink nodes that fetch data from the wild are required to put up collateral in the form of Chainlink tokens. There are multiple groundbreaking technologies that the Chainlink team is working on, however, to prevent any possibility of unreliable data. If Chainlink becomes a global standard, and billions or even trillions of dollars of value are required for collateral for use in smart contracts, it would require a far higher price of the Chainlink token. This gives the token itself tremendous potential value. Chainlink tokens can be locked up into smart contracts, which help run and secure the Chainlink network. This is called , and is currently not fully developed yet, but should hopefully be right around the corner. staking Since staking locks up the tokens into smart contracts to help power the network, it could pull up to 80–90% of the tokens out of the circulating supply. This could in turn lead to a severe supply shock, leading to a greatly increased demand for the token, therefore increasing its value. Chainlink staking could also lead to endless passive income generation, and if the value of the token goes anywhere near where I think it’s going, it could lead to wealth creation that would last for generations. Part 9: The God Protocol Remember, no one truly knows who created Bitcoin. Digital pioneer Nick Szabo originally came up with the concept of a smart contract in the 90’s. He also created a cryptocurrency eerily similar to Bitcoin called Bitgold before Bitcoin was even known, which ultimately ended up failing. He also pioneered the concept of something called the “God Protocol” back in the 90’s as well. The “God Protocol” defines Chainlink perfectly. This protocol, he conceptualizes, is "the most trustworthy third party imaginable. A deity that is on everybody's side. All the parties would send their inputs to God. God would reliably determine the results and return the outputs. God being the ultimate in confessional discretion, no party would learn anything more about the other parties' inputs than they could learn from their own inputs and the output." After hundreds of hours of research on Chainlink alone, I'm fully convinced that if there is a "God Protocol", Chainlink is it. It’s highly possible that Nick Szabo was involved with Bitcoin’s inception and was planning out Chainlink behind the scenes decades before anyone even knew what Bitcoin was… Part 10: The Chosen Coin I personally believe that Chainlink is the chosen coin of the global elite to help kick off the start of the 4th Industrial Revolution. The founder of the World Economic Forum (consisting of the global elite that meet at Davos Switzerland every year to discuss global shifts in technological trends, climate change, etc.) called out the company behind Chainlink’s technology (SmartContract) as to how we get to storing 10% of the world’s GDP ($10 to $20 trillion) on the blockchain by 2027. The members of the World Economic Forum have been ramping up their agenda on what they call the “Great Reset”. Call it a conspiracy if you want, but they aren’t even trying to hide their agenda any more. They have come out in plain view with their plans, and the writing is literally on the wall. The “Great Reset” agenda is, according to them, going to be a massive reset of the global financial system, among a reset of many other things throughout our society. Although some aspects of the “great reset” agenda are rather disturbing, Chainlink’s technology will be a key player behind propelling us into the . 4th industrial revolution As of December 9th, 2020, Sergey Nazarov co-wrote a paper with the WEF on the importance of oracles, and how it is likely to become a global standard to be used in all blockchains. The stars are aligning for Chainlink. Part 10: The Potential Upside of Chainlink To further bolster my argument, let’s compare the value stored with in blockchain as a whole to the value stored in global markets such as stocks and derivatives. This image is a bit outdated, but as of early 2021, cryptocurrency markets breached one trillion dollars. DeFi and cryptocurrency are barely a blip on the grand scale of our global markets. I don’t know about you, but I would rather place my bets in something that is still new and something more revolutionary then the advent of the internet itself, than something controlled by Wall Street that is at an all time high. I know it’s generally taboo and bad practice to make token price projections, but it’s fun to think about anyway. If Chainlink were to help capture the $10 to $20 trillion of the GDP on the blockchain, the value of a Chainlink token would go astronomical. Remember, the more value the Chainlink token helps secure in applications like DeFi, the more network effects and use cases it is involved with, and the more collateral that will be needed in the future for smart contracts, will all lead to an increase in Chainlink’s price going up. Nothing like Chainlink has ever been created before, so if Chainlink becomes a global standard and ends up securing billions, trillions, or maybe even quadrillions of dollars of value in the future, the sky is quite literally the limit. And no, quadrillions was not a typo. Chainlink has to the big dog, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which literally settles quadrillions of dollars each year. They also have strong ties to SWIFT as well. ties In all honesty, it’s almost impossible to value how much the Chainlink token could one day be worth as it’s an unprecedented asset that secures an unprecedented network and unlocks unprecedented use cases. And lastly, cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies are still very much in the early development stage as well as the early adoption phase. Sergey believes that we are starting to breach the point in which he calls “crossing the chasm”. Smart investors are getting involved, but there is a long ways to go before the herd fully realizes the power of blockchain and smart contract technologies, and before we cross the chasm. Conclusion In all fairness, I fully acknowledge that blockchain technology is one great experiment and could come crashing down tomorrow. However, fiat money used by governments throughout the world are also one great experiment as well. An experiment that has been tried over and over again throughout time, and has led to the downfall of many empires and nations. If I haven’t convinced you yet of Chainlink’s revolutionary technology and value proposition when coupled with blockchain, Ethereum smart contracts, and the web 3.0, then I’m not sure what to tell you at this point. I truly, deeply believe that Chainlink will not only become a global standard, but will also fully propel us into the 4th industrial revolution. Chainlink will become the one token to rule them all. This is why I think it is not only the greatest asymmetric risk/reward investment of our time, but will help change the world for good and could help quell the great storm coming our way. I don’t know about you, but I’m all in. Thanks for reading! Disclaimer: As a hardcore Chainlink fan, I do have a small investment in the Chainlink token, however I have no official ties to the company or team behind Chainlink. Do not take any of this as financial advice as I am not a financial professional- I am simply here to help spread the good word on Chainlink.