The process of building and managing smart contracts is often complex, time-consuming, and prone to error. ZeppelinOS makes the smart contract development process faster, easier, and more secure through a platform of tools and services built on top of the EVM.
We’ve outlined in our whitepaper how ZeppelinOS will allow smart contracts to access information on the blockchain that is currently unavailable from on-chain apps. For example, projects will be able to access the current ETH price, gas price, transaction pool size, and average mining block times.
To accomplish this, ZeppelinOS will need to provide trusted oracles. That’s why we’re excited to announce our new partnership with ChainLink, the leading provider of secure oracle services.
ChainLink bridges smart contracts to key off-chain resources like data feeds, APIs, and payment systems. Partnering directly with them provides several benefits:
ChainLink’s oracles will benefit ZeppelinOS users by giving them access to traditionally off-chain information. The ZeppelinOS platform itself will also benefit from this access.
For example, the platform’s Scheduler component is a bounty-based smart contract async execution manager. It allows for richer execution models through the use of a standardized set of signaling events. This makes it possible for standard mechanisms for requesting data from trusted and authoritative sources by adding a validation on the callback originator to ensure the response is provided by a secure oracle.
Our Marketplace feature is also able to use trusted oracles to its advantage. For example, oracles would allow for transactions of unlike currencies without the use of a formal exchange. This requires the developer to load tokens of the external protocol to a smart contract, creating a buffer. These tokens will be used to pay for protocol services as users pay for services in the application using ZEP tokens. The smart contract will have an oracle which dictates the exchange rate for converting ZEP to the external token. The developer then receives ZEP and spends the external tokens.
This partnership will allow each team to focus on what they do best. ChainLink has a proven record of execution with trusted oracle services, while our team at Zeppelin has expertise in smart contract security and development infrastructure. Our team’s have worked with each other in the past, and this agreement helps solidify many of the core components of the ZeppelinOS platform.