Chainlink Grant Program Announcement
On the 9th October 2020, the Chainlink Blog announced that it is accepting proposals from developer teams, with the first grant being for the purpose of integrating with the Solana Blockchain. The winning proposals will get $100,000+ with potential ongoing review for maintenance.
Cdot Was Announced that it is Receiving the First Grant !
On the 1st Jan 2021, there were several news announcements (ie: Bitcoin Insider) where Cdot is the first recipient of the grant and have been contracted to complete the following work:
- Validate and adapt Chainlink contracts to ensure native compatibility with Solana.
- Test and deploy all components to Solana, with continual maintenance and upgrades.
- Deliver a monitoring solution for Chainlink nodes operating on Solana.
Cdot is a Web3 infrastructure builder focused on blockchain interoperability, which they believe is the cornerstone of the next wave of blockchain innovations. The Cdot team is known for delivering cross-chain bridges and open-source software components to partners, granters and customers. Some of the notable infrastructure Cdot has already been contracted to provide technical services for include famous crypto protocols like Cosmos, Flow, PlatON, and now Solana and Chainlink.
“We’re thrilled to be awarded a Chainlink Community grant to bring the Chainlink Network natively onto the Solana blockchain and support more advanced smart contract applications,” stated Louis Liu, CEO of Cdot. “With Chainlink providing the most expensive set of secure price oracles in the market, we’re confident that we can provide all Solana ecosystem developers with seamless access to their existing oracle networks for Price Reference Data, Proof of Reserve, VRF, etc, as well as their established framework for launching completely customizable oracle solutions. This allows Solana ecosystem developers and protocols like Serum to support high-throughput financial applications that ultimately propel the entire DeFi ecosystem forward.”
Cdot, response to winning the Chainlink Community Grant
So What Blockchains Do Chainlink Currently have Nodes on?
Over at Chainlink Market, where you can visualise and pull data on the latest Chainlink nodes, data sources, feed frequency, node performance and understand Chainlink network economics, you can view all the Chainlink nodes per Blockchain network. The summary is as follows:
- Ethereum MainNet: 116 Nodes
- Binance MainNet: 1 Node
- Matic MainNet: 1 Node
- Solana: Coming Soon!
So What Benefit will Solana Based Chainlink Node Bring?
Based of Chainlink Market Metrics, the areas for improvement could be:
- Average On-Chain Response Latency: The length of time from when a feed requests data to when a node delivers it on-chain, averaged across all feeds the node services.
- Average Response Gas Price: The gas price a node uses to post data to a feed, averaged across all feeds the node services.
- Gas Spent per Day: The cumulative amount of gas a node spends in USD each day across all feeds the node services. (USD values shown according to historic prices)
Comparing the Top 3 Chainlink Nodes based off Total Runs per Day
Fiews, ChainLayer and LinkPool nodes processed just under ~2000 responses on the 4th Jan 2021.
Their average on-chain response latency was ~50 seconds.
They were rewarded just over 1000 Link for that day.
They made ~$15000 in revenue on the 4th of Jan 2021 respectively.
For Ethereum MainNet they spent over 500 Gwei per day, or ~$45,000 USD respectively.
This spike in gas fees correlates to the overall Ethereum network gas price chart:
Solana Chainlink Nodes Are Coming to the Rescue
Solana has an average transaction fee of just $0.00001 and block times are averaging at ~0.5 second.
To be a Chainlink node operator, you will definitely be able to provide chainlink oracle services at lower costs and faster latency on Solana, over the other available blockchains. It seems you will receive the same $Link (or more as you can provide feeds faster) therefore your revenue per day will go up.
Looking forward to using Chainlink Market to do a detailed comparison of the Solana vs Ethereum economics, as soon as the first Solana based Oracles come online! Bring it 2021 !
