SmartCon #1 hosted by Chainlink concludes successfully—seven key highlights you can't miss
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SmartCon #1 hosted by Chainlink concludes successfully—seven key highlights you can't miss
The summit brought together over 15,000 participants from more than 140 countries worldwide, who collectively watched over 200 leading founders, researchers, and developers from the industry share the most critical frontier innovations and collaborations within the blockchain ecosystem.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
The second Smart Contract Summit, SmartCon#1, has successfully concluded! We would like to thank all speakers and panelists for their insightful contributions, as well as the Chainlink community members for their enthusiastic support. Together, we made this summit one of the most prominent events in the blockchain industry in 2021.
Recently, Chainlink hosted the second Smart Contract Summit—SmartCon#1—which successfully came to a close. The event brought together over 15,000 participants from more than 140 countries worldwide, who tuned in to hear insights from over 200 leading founders, researchers, and developers on the most critical innovations and collaborations shaping the blockchain ecosystem. SmartCon#1 showcased numerous exciting advancements in the smart contract space, including developer speed runs, cutting-edge research on fair transaction ordering, enterprise adoption of blockchain technology, and Sergey Nazarov’s keynote announcement of theCross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
This article summarizes the most significant announcements and standout trends from the summit.
1. Off-chain and cross-chain services provide next-generation tools for dApp developers
As hybrid smart contracts continue to evolve, developers are increasingly recognizing the vital role secure off-chain services play in expanding dApp functionality—including verifiable randomness and low-cost automation. SmartCon highlighted how the Chainlink network is extending trust-minimized off-chain computation through the mainnet launch of Chainlink Keepers, the introduction of Fair Sequencing Service (FSS), and the announcement of the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP):
l Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov announced theCross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a new open-source standard enabling smart contracts to achieve cross-chain interoperability by transmitting messages/instructions and transferring tokens across chains. Its goal is to establish universal connectivity among hundreds of public and private blockchain networks, allowing isolated tokens to flow freely across all chain ecosystems and enabling the creation of cross-chain applications.
l Chainlink Keepers have launched on mainnet, enabling developers to securely automate smart contracts based on predefined conditions, eliminate manual processes, enable advanced dApp use cases, and allow project teams to focus on core product development.
l Ari Juels, Chief Scientist at Chainlink Labs, explained how the ongoing development of theChainlink Fair Sequencing Service (FSS) will address the widely debated issue ofMiner Extractable Value (MEV), establishing a more economically fair and robust mechanism for blockchain transaction ordering.
2. Global enterprises entering the blockchain space
This year’s SmartCon showcased how some of the world’s top enterprises are upgrading their infrastructure to provide valuable data and services to smart contract developers in support of decentralized application development.
l Google Cloud is partnering with Chainlink to connect smart contracts to NOAA weather datasets via Google BigQuery. On-chain parametric insurance can now receive reliable weather data from over 9,000 meteorological stations.
l The AWS Partner Network has collaborated with Chainlink Labs to develop AWS Chainlink Quickstart—a one-click solution that allows users to deploy highly available, secure, production-ready Chainlink nodes on AWS cloud within minutes.
l Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company, isrunning its own Chainlink node, further strengthening the security ofChainlink Data Feeds and adding additional security and decentralization to the most widely used price oracle in the industry.
l Marsh, the world’s largest insurance broker, announced a collaboration with Chainlink Labs to develop on-chain parametric insurance contracts using Chainlink oracles.
3. Smart contracts driving positive social impact in financial inclusion and environmental protection
Multiple speakers discussed how blockchain technology and smart contracts can drive societal progress and build a more open, equitable, and transparent global economic system.
l During the Social Impact Roundtable, leaders from exMachina and the GoodDollar social initiative discussed how blockchain technology and Chainlink’s decentralized oracles could bring high-quality weather and market data into deterministic, automated smart contracts to tackle critical issues such as climate change and income inequality.
l Marc Barasch from Green World Campaign and Martin Wainstein from Open Earth Foundation (a recipient of Chainlink Community Grants) discussed building open-source infrastructure to accurately track carbon emissions using hybrid smart contracts.
l Treejer protocol, funded by UNESCO, discussed using Chainlink VRF to generate ten thousand verifiable random NFTs, each representing a real-world tree planted, incentivizing users to provide microloans to farmers in rural areas.
l Seth Goldstein, founder of blockchain startup ZuzLab, and entrepreneur Cemil Türün discussed how digital identity and reputation can help local communities become economically interconnected, narrow wealth gaps, and promote sustainable local economies.
l Ryan Berkun, Fan Zhang, and Lorenz Breidenbach from Teller Labs discussed how DECO, a privacy-preserving oracle protocol for smart contracts, transforms data ownership in open digital ecosystems.
4. As DeFi accelerates, CeFi platforms are also becoming decentralized
DeFi platforms are rapidly advancing applications and innovation, while an increasing number of CeFi platforms are entering the blockchain ecosystem, decentralizing their infrastructure and integrating with DeFi protocols to enhance the reliability, transparency, and yield of financial products.
l Celsius Network, a leading CeFi platform in the market with over $16 billion in digital assets and more than 800,000 users, has now integrated Chainlink Price Feeds to determine loan interest rates—marking the first time a centralized finance platform issues loans based on a fully decentralized and transparent pricing mechanism.
l Founders of Ampleforth, Frax Finance, Fei Protocol, and TrustToken discussed the future of stablecoins, including algorithmic stablecoins and reserve-backed stablecoins, and howChainlink Keepers andProof of Reserve can ensure protocol autonomy and transparency.
l Ed Felten, co-founder of Offchain Labs, discussed how Ethereum Layer-2 protocol Arbitrum enhances network speed, scalability, and cost-efficiency through its flagship rollup chain, Arbitrum One. Arbitrum One boasts a broad ecosystem of partners and is ready to launch its beta version on mainnet.
5. Gaming and DeFi converge in the dynamic NFT space
Leaders from many NFT projects attended this SmartCon, showcasing the latest gaming dApps, including “play-to-earn” NFT applications and multi-game platforms where NFTs with embedded DeFi functions serve as game characters. The Chainlink network supports this wave of blockchain gaming with rich oracle capabilities, such as connecting game tokens to off-chain data, generating tamper-proof random numbers for in-game battles, and automatically harvesting game rewards.
l Aleksander Larsen, co-founder of Axie Infinity, demonstrated to the audience how the Axie team developed a successful “play-to-earn” game and leveraged the momentum of gaming economies to build a sustainable play-to-earn gaming platform.
l Jesse Johnson, co-founder of Aavegotchi, presented token-backed Aavegotchis—dynamic NFTs in the game minted based on tokens borrowed from the Aave protocol, which leverageChainlink VRF to generate verifiable randomness, delivering fair and auditable gameplay experiences.
l NFT project founders and Klaytn, a major NFT blockchain ecosystem leader, discussed innovative “play-to-earn” models, various aspects of GameFi, and the integration of dynamic NFTs into the metaverse and mainstream industries.
6. Innovation across the entire blockchain ecosystem is driving smart contract advancement
As multi-chain ecosystems rapidly expand, projects across all layers of the web3 tech stack and various blockchains are collaboratively exploring new smart contract use cases and enhancing dApp functionality, including privacy mechanisms and cross-chain development.
l Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at a16z, announced a collaboration with Chainlink to fund the development of a decentralized, censorship-resistant inflation dashboard providing cryptographically signed authoritative global inflation data. Winners will receive $100,000 in funding from Balaji and $100,000 from theChainlink Community Grants program.
l Celsius announced plans to utilize theCross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) in its yield-generating features to securely transfer funds locked on its platform to any other blockchain.
l Prominent academics from the Smart Contract Research Forum, Carnegie Mellon University, and Frankfurt School discussed during panels how privacy solutions such as various consensus mechanisms and zero-knowledge proofs can advance institutional blockchain adoption.
l Chainlink and Filecoin launched a joint grant program to incentivize developers to build hybrid smart contracts that create bidirectional connections between Chainlink’s decentralized oracles and Filecoin’s immutable storage system.
7. Growing demand for cryptographic truth
The final takeaway from SmartCon#1 is that Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov began his keynote by briefly outlining the historical evolution of fact-based contracts, then emphasized: Cryptographic truth is far more powerful than mere paper promises, which have repeatedly failed us. The growing number of users entering DeFi and large enterprises adopting smart contracts demonstrates their immense potential.
Over the past three days, numerous projects and enterprises participated in SmartCon—including DeFi protocols, CeFi platforms, gaming dApps, insurance giants, and leading cloud computing providers—all demonstrating strong cross-industry interest in decentralized systems and the pursuit of cryptographic truth to build a fairer and more just world.
Join the Chainlink ecosystem
We want to extend our gratitude to everyone who contributed to making SmartCon#1 a landmark event in the blockchain industry. Thank you to all speakers, developers, researchers, and attendees who joined us in celebrating the remarkable progress the industry has made over the past year—our success would not have been possible without your dedication and hard work.
To stay updated on the latest Chainlink news, follow Chainlink onTwitter, subscribe toChainlink News, andChainlink’s official YouTube channel. We will upload videos of summit talks, panels, and other sessions toYouTube—stay tuned.
Developers and teams interested in building with Chainlink should review thedeveloper documentation, join technical discussions onDiscord, orcontact Chainlink experts.
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