Chainlink Achieves Key Scalability Upgrade with Launch of Off-Chain Reporting (OCR)

OCR's new off-chain computation model reduces gas costs for node operators by up to 90% and increases the amount data brought on-chain by 10x

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Chainlink

Feb 24, 2021, 10:07 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- After over a year of in-depth research, development, and security audits, industry-leading blockchain oracle solution Chainlink has officially launched Off-Chain Reporting (OCR) on mainnet, marking a major milestone in the scalability of Chainlink's decentralized oracle network. With this latest version of its core client, Chainlink, which currently secures over $10 billion in smart contracts, is significantly improving the efficiency of how data is aggregated by oracles and delivered to blockchain-based smart contracts. Estimates indicate that OCR can reduce node operating costs like transaction fees by up to 90%, allowing for a 10x increase in the amount of real-world data that can be brought on-chain by the network for use by smart contracts.

"Historically, the growth of smart contracts is connected with the rate at which off-chain market data can be put on-chain for the creation of vertically focused use cases like decentralized finance. Chainlink's initial launch correlated heavily with the initial growth of DeFi and continues to underpin the continued expansion of the space's leading lending, insurance and derivatives smart contracts/protocols. Chainlink OCR's 10X scalability improvement will initially accelerate this existing dynamic, enabling even more DeFi applications to go live. This newest version of Chainlink will also enable oracles to provide more data to other categories of smart contracts such as insurance, gaming/NFTs, and many others, resulting in growth across several different sectors. Chainlink OCR is rapidly accelerating Chainlink's scalable future as the world's leading provider of highly validated data and trust minimized off-chain computation" said Chainlink Co-Founder, Sergey Nazarov.

OCR improves the scalability, security, and performance of the Chainlink Network by allowing Chainlink nodes to cost-effectively aggregate data off-chain. Nodes can fetch data from one or multiple data sources, sign it with a unique private key, and then broadcast it to the rest of an oracle network off-chain. Once a sufficient threshold of responses is reached, a single transaction containing every node's observation is transmitted on-chain and then validated by a smart contract, avoiding the need for multiple nodes to pay blockchain transaction fees. As a result of this increased efficiency, OCR will increase the decentralization of oracle networks, reduce onboarding costs for new nodes, reduce on-chain network congestion on blockchains like Ethereum, reduce deviation thresholds for on-chain oracle updates, and reduce oracle network latency during blockchain congestion.

Additionally, beyond accelerating the rate at which the Chainlink Network can bring data on-chain, like Price Feeds and Proof of Reserves, OCR will also set the foundation for Chainlink oracle networks to perform new types of trust-minimized off-chain computation in a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective manner. Whether it's combining numerous data types to build on-chain indexes or calculating insurance quotes using a variety of parameters, OCR will allow the Chainlink Network to provide smart contracts with a more advanced and broader range of trust-minimized computations, further enabling smart contract applications to generate real-world value for users across different industries.

For example, OCR will be used as the computation framework for Chainlink-powered oracle networks to start supporting Fair Sequencing Services (FSS) and DECO at scale for a cost-efficient price. This will allow oracles to process and fairly order transactions from a high-volume mempool, as well as generate distributed keys and zero knowledge proofs for data privacy, laying the foundation for a wide range of off-chain computations that broaden the role of oracles in the rapidly growing smart contract ecosystem.

For more information on OCR, read the announcement blog and the OCR protocol paper.

To join the discussion around OCR and its impact with other researchers and engineers across the community, visit the OCR Protocol Summary on the Smart Contract Research Forum.

If you are a developer and want to integrate a Chainlink Price Feed, request a new one, or build a custom oracle solution, refer to the technical documentation, join the Discord, or schedule a call to discuss further.

About Chainlink
Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universal 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.

SOURCE Chainlink