When chain link started, there weren't

really functioning oracles. And so what

contracts could do was actually very

limited and that they could really

mainly only exist on one chain and most

contracts were built as these big

monolithic single pieces of code and

they weren't separated into many

separate contracts or building blocks

that were all talking to each other.

Then you went to a world where you had

DeFi appear and chainlink grew DeFi from

a subund million industry to an over

$200 billion industry by providing one

type of oracle, the data oracle. The

data oracle initially provided primarily

market data which allowed DeFi to

operate because DeFi is really what we

would call a kind of hybrid smart

contract that is a combination of uh

data oracle and the conditions of the

smart contract itself. From there the

way oracles evolved really had to do

with what smart contracts were trying to

achieve. So as smart contracts tried to

go crosschain, as smart contracts tried

to access more data, as smart contracts

tried to interact with more off-chain

systems, you had new types of oracles

appear. You had connectivity oracles,

often known as bridges. Now you have

identity oracles. You also have AI

oracles, various types of oracles.

Chainlink is currently the only system

that provides all of these oracles in a

single platform.

That is the sense in which chain link is

an oracle platform that currently powers

the majority of DeFi, is the most widely

used technology for real world asset

tokenization

and is the leader in institutional

adoption of digital assets and the

tokenization trend in the capital

markets. The reason for that is that the

contracts continue to become more

complex and as they become more complex

they require more and more oracle types.

We've even reached the point where there

are so many oracle types and there are

so many individual contracts on a chain

and there are so many other chains that

the contracts want to interact with that

now you need something called an

orchestration oracle which is what the

chain link runtime environment is at its

core. It's a orchestration oracle that

can compose and manage all of these

different oracles

as well as all of these different chains

and all of these different contracts

to redefine what a smart contract is. So

if the definition of a smart contract

before DeFi was smart contracts on a

single chain and after DeFi it was

contracts plus oracles and then with a

crosschain multi-chain world it was a

DeFi protocol with a contract and an

oracle and a crosschain oracle or

bridge. Now the definition has expanded

even more to include identity oracles,

AI oracles, compliance oracles. And so

now as the contracts are used for more

things, as they're implemented in very

complex institutional flows, because of

this complexity, you have more and more

oracles and more and more complexity to

manage. That's what chain link does as

an oracle platform powering all these

different use cases. making sure that

you can easily build a secure and

reliable smart contract and then that

smart contract can have access to data,

identity, other chains, AIS and any

other additional system that it's going

to need to come. At the end of the day,

my view is that smart contracts will

continue to become only more complex.

You'll see the emergence of enterprise

and institutional grade smart contracts

which will have so many different

systems that they need to interact with.

All of which has to happen through

oracles and all of which should be

coordinated through a single system that

can reliably guarantee that those

off-chain systems and those onchain

systems and the various chains can all

interact to make a successful, reliable,

secure and easy to use application.

That is really where I think we're going

and that's why I think chain link's

evolution into an oracle platform that

powers all these critical use cases is

really where things are going to end up

for our industry and it's going to

position chain link in a place where it

becomes an even more critical piece of

infrastructure. Not only powering the

majority of DeFi, but hopefully powering

the majority of the institutional and

enterprise smart contract world.