Chainlink has acquired the privacy-focused DECO oracle protocol created by developers at Cornell University and is also working on the project’s second White Paper.
DECO was co-authored with Ari Juels, former chief scientist at RSA, a digital security company. He will now hold a similar position at Chainlink Labs. Jewels, who also teaches at Cornell University, developed DECO with other developers.
Chainlink co-founder Sergei Nazarov and Jewels have started to create the second White Paper of the project. As a reminder, the original Chainlink White Paper was created in 2017 by two developers in collaboration with CTO Steve Ellis.
The Chainlink oracle solution brings off-grid data to blockchain smart contracts. Chainlink provides data information for most decentralized finance applications. For example, DeFi protocol dYdX recently launched perpetual contracts for LINK / USD based on Chainlink oracles.
“DECO is also useful for users who want to monetize their own data and therefore prove that they are indeed providing the correct data without disclosing any information other than what they are selling,” according to the DECO website.
Nazarov said that developers can use DECO as a basis for, for example, uncontrolled loans or decentralized identification. DECO can prove that a person is over 18 years old by obtaining data from the Department of Motor Vehicle Registration, but hiding the person’s date of birth.
In the future, this solution can be applied to decentralized finance. Nazarov said the DECO oracle could one day allow a smart contract to request off-network credit information such as bank records without revealing too much sensitive data.
“DECO is the path that many collaterals will take to DeFi,” Nazarov said. Jewels noted that such confidentiality is possible thanks to the introduction of zero-knowledge proof.
As a reminder, last month Binance Smart Chain integrated the Chainlink decentralized oracles, and Huobi was the first major exchange to launch the Chainlink node.
