Ex-RSA CS Ari Juels releases smart contracts connectivity whitepaper; Facebook DOE Evan Cheng joins ChainLink advisory board

A street sign for Kearny Street in San Francisco, CA. SmartContract.com is located at 334 Kearny Street.

Leading cryptography academic and former RSA chief scientist Ari Juels has co-authored and released a technical whitepaper with the team behind leading blockchain middleware provider SmartContract.com, which is used by technical leaders like SWIFT and enables smart contracts to securely link with outside data sources and off-chain payment procedures. The peer-reviewed paper, which provides new insights into how smart contracts can develop beyond being utilized as token sale mechanisms, also introduces ChainLink, which is creating the first fully decentralized oracle network (the ChainLink Network) that allows smart contracts to securely connect with real world data, any/all APIs and conventional bank payments. ChainLink also has announced adding Facebook’s director of engineering, Evan Cheng, as an active technical advisor.

“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,” said SmartContract.com and ChainLink CEO Sergey Nazarov in a press release CoinReport received.

Juels, who led the research, is presently a widely recognized professor of computer science at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, in addition to a co-director of IC3, an enterprise of faculty members at Technion, Cornell Tech, Cornell University, UIUC and UC Berkeley. Juels has made outstanding contributions to the field of cybersecurity and made world-altering contributions to distributed systems research via his renowned work on Proof of Retrievability, which chief decentralized systems like Storj, Filecoin and others are considerably founded on.

“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,” commented Nazarov.

Cheng antecedently developed LLVM, which is counted on by all Apple iOS and Mac devices to run their secure, lower-level machine code, in addition to performing a significant role in how secure, lower-level machine code is run by some of the top technology firms of the world, including Intel, Google, Nvidia, AMD and several more technical leaders that rely on running protected, tamper-proof systems. Cheng was bestowed the respected ACM Software Systems Award when LLVM was distinguished as a worldwide standard for generating secure, low-level machine code, allowing the everyday use of everything from Nvidia graphics cards to Google search to iPhones.

“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,” stated Nazarov.

There is a high demand for contribution in the ChainLink token crowdsale, which starts September 19 at 15:00:00 UTC. As a result, the ChainLink team has prudently developed a reasonable pathway to ensure extensive access. The sale will comply with a stringent whitelisting process that enables the inclusion of the larger blockchain community and those wanting to back a fully decentralized blockchain middleware.

LINK tokens will be used within the ChainLink Network, which allows smart contracts to securely access numerous off-chain resources essential to becoming beneficial for trade finance, insurance, financial and other mission-critical agreements. Developers will be able to use the LINK tokens to pay each ChainLink Node Operator for the exclusive data, off-chain payment capabilities and APIs they offer. This allows for a system to securely, rapidly, and verifiably link smart contracts to exterior data sources, internal systems, current banking infrastructure and APIs, all of which they require to be purposeful for real world use cases.

The ChainLink Network utilizes many other open source projects. The press release we received says ChainLink is being developed in an open source fashion in the interests of giving back and contributing to the community.

Image credit – Jon ‘ShakataGaNai’ Davis  (CC BY-SA 3.0)