On Monday (November 25), Ontology announced a collaboration with Chainlink in order to allow externally connected smart contracts on the Ontology platform.
Like NEO, Ontology is a China-based open source blockchain project. However, rather than being just a general-purpose smart contracts platform, Ontology focuses on the concept of digital identity (e.g. medical records, intellectual property). Ontology’s mainnet was launched in June 2018.
As for Chainlink, it is a decentralized oracle network that makes it possible for smart contracts (theoretically, on any blockchain) to connect to “real world data, events and payments.”
According to the post published on Ontology’s Medium blog earlier today, here is what Chainlink’s oracles do:
“Blockchains are self-contained ecosystems that can only perform computation on data already stored within it (on-chain). An oracle is a gateway to the external world (off-chain). An oracle allows off-chain data inputs to come into the smart contract and output data to be pushed out on to external systems. In this regard, oracles provide answers to questions a smart contract may have about external events, such as ‘Did the goods arrive on time to the retailer?’ Oracles also allow smart contracts to use this information to trigger changes in the real world, such as triggering a payment on an existing payment system upon the arrival of goods.”
The Ontology team says that this partnership with Chainlink “provides a new option to the Ontology ecosystem with regards to creating externally connected smart contracts, which has massive benefits for our ecosystem developers.”
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