Cardano partners with Chainlink to develop smart contracts and DeFi applications

Input Output recently announced that it would leverage Chainlink’s decentralized oracles to make it easier for developers to access real-world databases, paving the way to build DeFi applications on Cardano’s blockchain. Although sentiment surrounding the partnership has been positive, the native tokens for both projects have failed to react.

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the developer team behind Cardano, has entered a new strategic partnership with Chainlink Labs. The goal is to enable developers to seamlessly build smart contracts on top of Cardano, according to a blog post by IOHK. By integrating tamper-proof, high-quality external data with blockchains, digital agreements can be executed automatically under predefined conditions.

“Access to real-world databases will be supplied through Chainlink’s decentralized ‘oracle’ networks… Enabling ‘smart contracts’ to execute around datasets such as election results, sports stats, and cryptocurrency rates,” said in the post. “After-market price feeds, support for other Chainlink decentralized services will follow: sports data for prediction markets, weather data for parametric insurance products, and verifiable randomness for gaming and digital collectibles such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”

Discussing the update, Input Output CEO Charles Hoskinson said that oracles are essential for DeFi applications to flourish on Cardano as they make real-world data accessible. He added that the firm was “committed to providing developers with the most secure and robust tooling for building useful solutions on Cardano,” and that integrating Chainlink’s oracle was “an easy choice.”

The partnership’s longer-term goals include interchain networking, according to Niki Ariyasinghe, head of blockchain partnerships at Chainlink Labs.

“Cross-chain interoperability is another longer-term goal. This is really a framework for enabling bridges between different chains and enabling a multi-chain world. So this is something that we hope to collaborate on with the Cardano ecosystem as well,” she said.

Meanwhile, Chainlink’s co-founder Sergey Nazarov stated that developers building DeFi applications on Cardano would be able to “plug-and-play” price feeds into their smart contracts.

Despite the significance of the announcement, both ADA and LINK failed to react. The tepid response may be a result of market participants showing concern about the repercussions of China’s latest crackdown on virtual assets.

As previously reported, Cardano has partnered with COTI to launch its first stablecoin, Djed, giving space to cheaper transactions and making it easier to run DeFi projects on Cardano’s blockchain.

The Djed stablecoin will promote the growth of its nascent ecosystem, especially support of smart contracts, amid the strong expectations about the possible development of DeFi platforms on Cardano that has been touted as the future ‘Ethereum killer.’