Chainlink releases a native Substrate module to bring its oracles to Polkadot. Polkadot and Chainlink have announced the release of Chainlink’s Price Feeds as a module, or “pallet” in Polkadot terminology, for the Substrate blockchain framework.

Collaboration Between Chainlink and Polkadot

The announcement comes as the latest result of a long-standing collaboration between Chainlink and Polkadot. In simple terms, the release indicates that any project building on the Substrate framework can integrate Chainlink oracles through a simplified library. Substrate framework includes Polkadot and Kusama parachains, as well as independent blockchains now offering a tangible product that can enable several DeFi-centric use cases on Polkadot.

#Chainlink Price Feeds are now available as an oracle pallet to all #Substrate, #Polkadot, & #Kusama chains. This gives teams building across the Polkadot ecosystem a standardized, easy-to-integrate, & time-tested oracle solution to support their DeFi appshttps://t.co/Ak1vqQxlYk

— Chainlink – Official Channel (@chainlink) April 2, 2021

The integration as a Substrate pallet denotes that it is up to each individual parachain to integrate and enable Chainlink oracles. This is significantly different from the architecture used on Ethereum, where Chainlink nodes regularly publish price data on each block, which smart contracts can then choose to reference or ignore. 

Introducing Off-Chain Reporting Architecture

On Polkadot, the more flexible design foreshadows that parachains do not need Chainlink data, and hence won’t need to devote any blockchain space to it. Although looking at the individual parachains, the end result may look similar to Ethereum. 

Head Of Communications at Parity Technologies, Peter Mauric, compared the situation to “as if Chainlink were integrated as an opcode on Ethereum.”

The complete LINK integration is likely to welcome DeFi-centric parachains like Equilibrium, Moonbeam, or Acala, especially from the perspective of introducing Ethereum projects to Polkadot. The MoonBeam project is planning on setting up a custom parachain that emulates the Ethereum Virtual Machine environment, effectively recreating Ethereum (ETH) on DOT.

The project recently began a shift toward focusing on more than just price data, a pivot that comes at the heels of introducing the Off-Chain Reporting architecture. The Off-Chain Reporting upgrade changes how oracles aggregate data, easing the burden on the blockchains.