Chainlink is one of the most popular project in 2020. The token price double in 2020. 

Here's why : ).

Let's start with a use case;

As you can see from the diagram: Various Bank sends their interest rates to Chainlink Smart Oracle to generate an average Libor Rate. This rate from Chainlink's smart oracle is decentralised, trustworthy and immutable is used by a smart contract to calculate a coupon payment that is send to the Swift Network.  

When Swift Network with with Chainlink, all the banks may eventually have to supply data to use Chainlink services. It becomes a virtuous cycle as Chainlink will have growing data feed and conquer this market in providing decentralised smart oracle.

Key Usage

Most data are inside traditional centralised server. There is a need for a way to retrieve this information and use it on the Blockchain network.

With Chainlink, you have a fully end-to-end self-executing smart contract that can retrieve information and securely push data to Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) and various legacy systems. API a set of functions and procedures allowing the creation of applications that access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service.

Here are some of the data feeds for various markets;

• Chainlink partners with with most of the DeFi providers like Synthetic, Aave and MakerDao. They need Chainlink service because if the DeFi rely on centralised data source for price feed, a centre point of failure exist which then defeats the purpose of the DeFi. Chainlink provides a decentralized smart oracles which do not have a center point of failure. This will truely decentralized DeFi projects. 
  
  
• Securities smart contracts such as bonds, interest rate derivatives, and many others will require access to APIs reporting market prices and market reference data, e.g. interest rates.
  
  
• Insurance smart contracts will need data feeds about IoT data related to the insurable event in question. Chainlink partner with Hdac blockchain, founded by Dae-Sun Chung of the Hyundai family, an IoT plaform based on blockchain to help connect devices.
  
  
• Trade finance smart contracts will need GPS data about shipments, data from supply chain ERP systems, and customs data about the goods being shipped in order to confirm the fulfilment of contractual obligations.

Team

25 people team and growing, led by Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis with relevant experience.  The CEO, Sergey Nazarov, is a serial entrepeneur who co-founded Secure Asset Exchange and Existlocal before founding SmartContract. The CTO, Steve Ellis, was previously a Software Engineer and Team Lead at Pivotal Labs where he worked on securing sensitive HIPAA compliant data and building scalable payments automation software.

Potential

One of the most impressive results of Chainlink is that almost all the reputable projects have chosen them as the decentralised oracle provider.

Chainlink is building a new product which no one knows if it will work. If it does work successfully, Chainlink will be like the future “Oracle” where every company will be using to integrate traditional database to Blockchain. Data will be able to be transmitted from centralised traditional database to Blockchain projects. Imagine data from Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) or Enterprise Relationship Manager(ERM) can now be pass to the Blockchain.

By far Chainlink is the only decentralised oracle that has achieve the highest numbers of partnership. It seem like most enterprise and blockchain projects have choose Chainlink to be their oracle provider.

According to the Chainlink’s community spreadsheet 2020, their partnership includes;

- 30+ Price Feeds on Ethereum Mainnet utilized by 14+ DeFi projects in production.
- 100+ integrations including Polkadot , Tezos , Synthetix , Aave , Openlaw , Web3 and more.
- Partnered with large enterprises such as Google , Oracle , SWIFT and more.

Chainlink is leading or playing a key role in creating the standard for the industry to follow:

• Enterprise Ethereum Alliance where Chainlink lead the Mainnet Integration for enterprise (EMINENT) Taskforce.
• Baseline protocol that is presented by Big four Ernst & Yong in collaboration with Microsoft, Consensys,AMD and others to delivery an open standard to provide secure and private business process at low cast via the public Ethereum Mainnet. By being part of the companies who is providing the common protocol for all companies to use, Chainlink again will be the defector oracle provider.
• Hyperledger Avalon. Chainlink alongside with other partners such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and others is working on the Avalon specification to shift in a secure manager the on-chain process to off-chain (cloud) increasing performance while still keeping integrity and attestation. 

FULL LIST of platforms, integrations, frameworks, clients & partnerships https://chainlinkecosystem.com 

Link Tokens has good use case and demand when the system works;

- Users need to pay with link tokens to use the service

- Node providers need to stake Link Tokens to earn Link Tokens. In the even if they fail to do so or did a bad job in maintaining the uptime, the link tokens that they stake can be used as a form of punishment. 

When it comes to financial data where millions, billions or even trillions at stake, enterprise will pay for quality data. This translates to higher fee to attract more node providers.

Abstract for my Book New Assets 3.0 that will be available in Amazon. 
I have also create a comic book call Wish I knew, that talks about what life will be like with the Blockchain Technology. Details at www.wishiknewcomics.com