The team of Chainlink, a leading blockchain oracle platform, today announced that after over a year of development and numerous security audits, Chainlink Off-Chain Reporting (OCR) has officially launched on mainnet. This marks a major milestone in the scalability of Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks.
OCR significantly improves the efficiency of how data is computed across Chainlink oracles, reducing operating costs by up to 90% and enabling the Chainlink Network to accelerate the development of universally connected smart contracts both in DeFi markets and across various other industries.
The most immediate benefit to DeFi and its users will be a 10x increase in the amount of real-world data that can be made available to smart contract applications.
This large increase in on-chain data will enable further innovation across DeFi, decentralized insurance, blockchain-based gaming, and numerous other sectors, as smart contract developers leverage newly available datasets for a wider range of financial products and markets.
“While the Chainlink Network has already been rapidly increasing the amount of data it provides on-chain through the continual rollout of Price Feeds, Proof of Reserve, verifiable randomness (VRF), and more, OCR’s scalability improvements will massively accelerate that trend. With OCR, smart contract developers will have greater access to external data across a more diverse set of assets, real-world events, and blockchains, allowing them to service new industries and unique use-cases.”
– The Chainlink Team
Additional Benefits of OCR
OCR is the third and latest version of the Chainlink Core client run by Chainlink nodes. As such, all Chainlink nodes operating in-production will now be running OCR and FluxMonitor clients in parallel to generate both scalability and security through redundancy.
Multi-client diversity ensures automatic failover protection in the event of any potential black swan event, further enhancing the hyper-reliability of the Chainlink Network at all times.
In addition to supplying more data on-chain through the launch of new oracle networks, OCR brings a variety of other notable enhancements to the Chainlink Network:
- Increased decentralization of oracle networks – to generate additional accuracy, availability, and ‘tamper-proofness’ for Chainlink users.
- Higher frequency on-chain oracle updates – to provide even more precise and up-to-date data to smart contract applications that may be more sensitive to small price movements.
- Cost-efficient onboarding of new nodes – to further decentralize participation in oracle services run on the Chainlink Network.
- Reduced on-chain network congestion – by lessening the load Chainlink oracle networks place on high-demand blockchain networks like Ethereum.
- Reduced oracle network latency – to ensure data is rapidly provided to smart contracts even during blockchain network congestion and extreme market volatility.
