CHAINLINK WHITE PAPER; ITS DETAILS AND SUMMARY.

CHAINLINK
Contractual agreement had come a long way from the traditional contractual agreement that is manually driven,encumbered with paper works and is influenced by an intermediaries thereby making the agreement mechanism slower,conflict filled and costly to be replaced by the smart contractual agreement mechanism that is a digital self executing block-chain called the ORACLE.The oracle are faster,cheaper and more secure as it eliminates the bottleneck of the 3rd party in the contract mechanism.
The smart contract helps transaction in a conflict free way in the absence of intermediaries like brokers,agents or lawyers.The smart contract technology defines the rules and automatically enforces these obligations.Smart contract application ranges from financial services to property law,insurance premiums,breach contracts,legal processes and crowd funding agreement.Smart contract controls all the asset management lifecycle.
HOW THE SMART CONTRACT WORKS
An option contract between anonymous parties is written as code in the public ledger(block-chain).The contractual obligation is triggered and the contract executes itself according to the coded term,while the regulators uses the public ledger to understand market activity without compromising the privacy of the parties.
smart contract is based on the if-then premise and witnessed by the regulator.In a simple language "if you have a property to sell,traditional you will need to advertise your property on platforms available thereby involving an agent,broker or lawyer but with the smart contract,you pay crypto-currency,encode your contract on the ledger,and it becomes public and the buyer pay crypto-currency and you get a virtual receipt,then the seller release the digital key to the buyer to take delivery of the property but if there is a contractual ...the fund paid by the buyer is refunded automatically.
The smart contract was introduced to public ledger by Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum in 2015.But after the novelty of the smart contract,the limitations of the smart contract was found out this smart contract can only access data on its block chain as it operates a centralised oracle service.Therefore the need for a modification that will allow the smart contract to access data from outside its block-chain and brings it into the blockchain.This modification give rise to the CHAINLINK,a de-centralised oracle network hosted on Ethereum block-chain,which connects the on-chain and off-chain networks.It has a two part architecture made of the on-chain architecture and the off-chain architecture.
THE ON CHAIN ARCHITECTURE
As an Oracle network,enquiries are made by the requesting contract USER-SC to the chainlink nodes which return replies to the queries made by the requesting contract.The interface which connects the requesting contract with the chainlink node is the CHAINLINK-SC.The chainlink on-chain interface comprises of three main contracts namely
The reputation contract which keeps track of oracle service provider performance metrics to verify their integrity
The Order matching contract which takes a proposed service level agreement,SLA,log in the SLA parameters,collects bids from oracle network,select the best bid using the reputation contract and finalises the oracle service level agreement.
The Aggregate Contract which collects the chosen oracle network provider responses,circulate the final collective results and accumulates these collective responses and balance them to find the most accurate result.These contracts are designed in a modular manner which allowed the user to configure or replace them as needed.
Using these contracts the Chainlink on chain undergoes three processes namely;
ORACLE SELECTION:The user specifies a set of parameter requires for data search and these parameters are collectively known as SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT.When the SLA is submitted,the user can manually search for oracles and filter them,but when manual search is not possible,automated oracle matching option is initialised to solve this problem and when this option is used the oracle carry out the bid based on the contract SLA and even finalise the deal of selection.
DATA REPORTING:After the best matched oracle is chosen,the off-chain oracle executes the agreement and report back on-chain.
RESULT AGGREGATION:The aggregating oracle tallies all the data and average the data to provide an accurate weighted answer.
OFF CHAIN ARCHITECTURE
It consist of off-chain oracle nodes connected to the Ethereum network.These off-chain nodes collect data independently from the off-chain resources as requested by user contracts.Chainlink offchain nodes are powered by the standard open source core implementation so after collecting the relevant data,the nodes process the data through chain-link core-core node software which supports the relationship of the off chain component to relates with the chainlink block chain,schedules and balance works across the external services.after the data had been processed they are known as assignments, which are blocks of smaller job specification known as subtask which are processed as a pipeline.Chainlink core transmit the subtasks to the on-chain oracle contract for result aggregation and the off-chain oracle operators are rewarded for the assignment done with LINK,the chainlink tokens.The LINK token is an ERC20 token with an ERC223 "transfer and call functionality of address" which allows tokens to be received and processed in a single transaction.
The off-chain nodes may choose to integrate external adapters which are plug-ins that node users can use to accomodate a number of additional subtasks into the operation base.
ORACLE SECURITY
A well functional blockchain with its ledger or bullet board abstract offers a very strong security properties.Users rely on blockchains as a functionality that correctly validates transactions and prevents them from been tampered with.A supporting oracle is also needed to offer a trusted security service and for an oracle to be trustworthy it must have integrity,confidentiality and availability.To achieve a near perfect oracle that ticks all the boxes for perfection,Chainlink implements the SOURCE and ORACLE DISTRIBUTION.This implementation is of 3 processes:
Distribution of data sources:by sourcing data from multiple sources.A trustworthy oracle queries a collection of data.
Distribution of Oracles:by creating a collection of different oracle nodes which consult their various sources which may or may not overlap and the blockchain calculated the weighted average results
Use of trusted hardware:Trusted hardware is a subtle challenge that is difficult to solve as it needs a complex solution to solve thus the proposing of 4 key security services:
The Validation system,reputation system,certification service and a contract upgradeservice.The first 3 systems provides ratings that the user use to make their decision while the contract upgrade service is optional for the users.
The validation system:Chainlink validation system monitors various on-chain oracle behaviors providing an objective performance data that can guide the users on the best oracle to select.This system seeks to evaluate oracle availability and correctness.
The reputation system which will record and publish user ratings for oracle providers and nodes thus providing a means for users to evaluate oracle performance holistically.
The Certification service which is meant to prevent or correct rare but catastrophic events such as sybil and mirroring attacks.This service issues endorsement of high quality oracle providers based on several features of oracle deployment and behaviour.
The Contract upgrade service which is a quick fix to override the bugging issue common in smart contract services.Migration of users to new oracle contracts functions a s a kind of escape hiatch.
But in the long run these security services are short or middle term solution or quick fixes measure to a more demanding security questions.
The long-term technical strategy for ChainLink includes three key directions: Oracle confidentiality, infrastructure changes, and off-chain computation.
The most commonly used option for oracle services today are centralized oracle providers. This approach has its drawback as it creates a centralized point of control, and thus does not meet the high standards of tamper resistance that trustl-ess smart contracts require. This problem is tackled by some systems relying on notarization, to “prove” correct behavior. This use of notarization services is worrisome in view of documented problems with these services and the fact that their attestations cannot be feasibly verified on-chain, resulting in a (potentially recursive) need for further verification.
Another approach to delivering trustworthy oracle data is to rely on manual human input of unstructured data. These “manual-input oracle” are commonly proposed for use in prediction-markets.Unfortunately,human cognition is costly and slow, manual-input oracles therefore are resource-intensive, not real-time, and can handle only a limited set of questions at any given time. ChainLink is very useful for instant and automatic resolving of prediction-market contracts that can be resolved by structured data.
A final approach is to change the form of data at the source. If a data source digitally signed the data it provided, then the relaying server would not need to be trusted. USER-SC could simply check the signatures on data it receives.
The core values of chainlink that is driving his future are
Decentralization for secure and open systems. •Modularity for simple, flexible system design.
Open source for secure, extensible systems.
TEAM
Chainlink has a small nuclear family of 2 comprising of Sergey Narzarov the CEO and founder and Steve Ellis.
CHAIN LINK IN MARKET
Chainlink was launched in September,2017 and at the time of writing, already has a market cap of $123,949,350 and a circulating currency of 350 million out of a maximum total supply of 1 billion and is currently ranked 89 on the global cryptocurrency rankings all within 6 months of its ICO.
Chainlink has won the confidence of investors as it now partnered with SWIFT to develop the SWIFT SMART ORACLE,other partners include Cornell IC3 and the world economic forum had chosen it as the shift in action for smart contract.
Truly the future holds bright prospect for chainlink