Taraxa to Integrate a Chainlink Time-Stamp Oracle for Tracking Informal Transaction Agreements.
Taraxa is excited to announce the ongoing work towards integrating a timestamp oracle solution using the world’s leading decentralized oracle provider, Chainlink. This will provide the Taraxa blockchain with a decentralized and trusted source of time for all informal transactional agreements, enabling Taraxa’s smart contracts to leverage real-time (pun intended) data feeds from sources such as NIST as a means of assigning timestamps to anchored transactions in its audit log.
How Chainlink’s Decentralized Timestamp Oracles Benefit Taraxa’s Use Cases.
The Chainlink-powered decentralized timestamp oracles will verify the chain of custody for off-chain transactions and the timing of data commitments anchored into the Taraxa ledger. This is critically important since timing is often a core condition for triggering transactional agreements.
Time is frequently used as a trigger in transactional agreements, such as recurring loan payments or legally required breaches of contract notifications. For example, Service level agreements (SLAs) often have time-based conditions; e.g., merchandise must be delivered within a certain amount of time or a repair job must be completed within a defined timeframe. The prevalence of time-based transactional agreements makes using on-chain timestamps as a form of initiation and completion for Taraxa’s informal agreements highly critical.
Even without timing-specific clauses, informal agreements can benefit from a sense of relative timing between agreements beyond the simple ordering done by blockchains naturally, particularly as a way to determine good faith or general competence amongst the stakeholders. For example, if three contractors are working on a project together, then a client-issued change to the order agreement should be made with all three at around the same time due to the interdependent nature of their work. Otherwise, a failure to deliver may not be the fault of the contractors, but of their client.
There’s truly a myriad of use cases that can benefit from using Chainlink decentralized oracles to bring timestamps into anchored informal agreements, such as automated contract payments, automated loan issuance for DeFi applications, and many more.
Why Taraxa Selected Chainlink for Timestamp Oracles?
Since blockchains have no built-in sense of time and smart contracts cannot natively fetch off-chain sources of time, an oracle is needed to bring external timestamps on-chain. However, doing so requires a secure oracle solution, specifically because the oracle input becomes a key trigger in the settlement of real-world contracts. We selected Chainlink because it provides a multitude of proven features that result in robust oracle security and extensive customizability:
- Flexible: Chainlink is API-agnostic, meaning we can use it to retrieve high-quality time data from any off-chain source, such as NIST, AWS Time Sync, Google Public NTP, and other time-based APIs.
- Security: Chainlink is thoroughly audited open-source software powered by a large collection of independent, security reviewed, and Sybil-resistant oracle nodes operated by leading blockchain DevOps and data providers.
- Decentralized: Chainlink oracle networks are decentralized at both the node and data source levels to ensure high availability and manipulation resistance in the sourcing and delivering of external data on-chain.
- Time-tested: Chainlink already secures billions of dollars in value on mainnet for top blockchain-based applications, even providing on-chain updates during periods of high gas prices and extreme network congestion.
Chainlink-Taraxa Technical Integration Details
The Chainlink nodes continuously access time data by calling reliable off-chain sources. A Chainlink-powered decentralized oracle network then aggregates the data collected by nodes off-chain, before then delivering an aggregated timestamp update on-chain to the Time Feed reference contract hosted on the Taraxa blockchain when certain conditions are met. The Time Feed Contract on the Taraxa chain serves as an on-chain resource for DApp developers to use when time data is required to trigger an event. The time oracle also serves as a protocol-level definition of time for all commitments to the Taraxa ledger.
“Taraxa is very excited to integrate Chainlink, the world’s leading decentralized oracle protocol. Not only will a timestamp oracle deliver tremendous operational value to our customers’s agreements which are dependent on time, but it vastly enriches Taraxa’s ecosystem as a whole by giving developers a critical input that can enable many new classes of functionality.” — Steven Pu, Co-founder and CEO of Taraxa.
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universally connected smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.
Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.
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About Taraxa
Taraxa is a purpose-built, fast, scalable, and device-friendly public ledger designed to track informal and unstructured transactional data to minimize business friction. Founded in 2018 by a group of accomplished engineers and academics, Taraxa has not only built a state of the art decentralized infrastructure, but also delivered market-tested application platforms to secure machine state integrity, and track everyday agreements between people.
