The World Economic Forum (WEF) recently identified Chainlink (LINK), MakerDAO (MKR), Lightning Labs, Elliptic, Ripio and Veridium Labs as ‘Technology Pioneers’ of 2020. The overall list consists of companies from across the world building solutions in a varied set of domains. 

Startups that are recognized as Technology Pioneers by the WEF are part of its ‘Strategic Intelligence’ ecosystem, which “helps industry leaders and decision-makers navigate transformations across industries, economies and global issues based on the insight and perspectives of the experts and innovators engaged with the Forum.”

Chainlink (LINK) is building an oracle service that connects smart contracts with real-world data, which facilitates more accurate results in decentralized applications, as well as providing a greater breadth of use cases. 

MakerDAO (MKR) is a cornerstone of the decentralized finance (Defi) system, allowing users to lock crypto collateral in order to generate the stablecoin DAI. It is currently the largest contributor to the defi space - which is showing tremendous growth with synthetic assets, decentralized exchanges and lending platforms.

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said that he was looking forward to foster discussion about how the platform could help,

Using smart contracts on the blockchain to bring enforceable guarantees to contractual obligations has widespread social and economic benefits. We're proud to play a role in bringing accountability and automation to global and local economies, and we look forward to contributing to Forum dialogues on this challenge.

Both projects are key players in the defi space, with Chainlink being a go-to platform for data feeds in the space. The Tezos (XTZ) project recently announced that a few community projects had integrated Chainlink’s oracles.

MakerDAO, meanwhile, recently introduced two real world assets as collateral for generating DAI.