Chainlink releases 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.

The release means that any project building on the Substrate framework — which includes Polkadot and Kusama parachains, as well as independent blockchains — can integrate Chainlink oracles through a simplified library.

The announcement comes as the latest result of a long-standing collaboration between Chainlink and Polkadot, now offering a tangible product that can enable a number of DeFi-centric use cases on Polkadot.

The integration as a Substrate pallet means that it is up to each individual parachain to integrate and enable Chainlink oracles. This is a significant change 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.

On Polkadot, the more flexible design means that parachains that do not need Chainlink data won’t need to devote any blockchain space to it. On individual parachains, however, the end result may look similar to Ethereum. Peter Mauric, head of communications at Parity Technologies, compared the situation to “as if Chainlink were integrated as an opcode on Ethereum.”

The complete Chainlink integration is likely to be welcome news for DeFi-centric parachains like Moonbeam, Equilibrium or Acala, especially from the perspective of introducing Ethereum projects to Polkadot. However, there is likely to be additional development work required to adapt the Chainlink pallet for use with smart contracts.

Chainlink is used by a number of DeFi projects on Ethereum to read external market data — a critical necessity for lending protocols, in particular. 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.