Search engine giant Google on Thursday announced that it has partnered with Chainlink to allow Ethereum app developers, using Google’s services, to integrate data from sources outside the blockchain.
This, per the company, will ease the development of hybrid blockchain applications. In the official blog post, Google Cloud’s developer advocate Allen Dey detailed the functionality and applications of the platforms.
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Learn how to use Chainlink services to provide data from #BigQuery crypto public datasets on-chain, which helps reduce inefficiencies & enables new on-chain business models to emerge by adding entirely new capabilities to Ethereum smart contracts ↓ https://t.co/yVekclgafQ
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In February, Google first made available the public blockchain data of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and six other cryptocurrencies on its big data query analytics platform BigQuery. However, to source data from the off-chain processes, the platform needed a gateway, and in this case, Chainlink is playing this role. This will add a layer on the blockchain and allow processes to implement directly on the distributed network.
“A business process implemented as a smart contract is performed on-chain, and that is of limited utility without having access to off-chain inputs. To close the loop and allow bidirectional interoperation, we need to be not only making blockchain data programmatically available to cloud services but also cloud services programmatically available on-chain to smart contracts,” Day explained.
The oracle of two technologies
The post also detailed how the integration of its cloud analytics services with Chainlink will help to improve major blockchain markets, including prediction market, hedging against blockchain platform risks, and transaction privacy on Ethereum.
Chainlink is a blockchain data provider which fetches heaps of on-chain and off-chain data for smart contract execution. In 2017, the company raised $32 million via an initial coin offering (ICO).
“This assembly of components allows a smart contract to take action based on data retrieved from an on-chain query to the internet-hosted data warehouse. At a high level, Ethereum Dapps (i.e., smart contract applications) request data from Chainlink, which in turn retrieves data from a web service built with Google App Engine and BigQuery,” the post noted.