Sergey Nazaroz, the CEO of the leading decentralized oracle startup, Chainlink, announced on stage today at the Ethereum Devcon 4 Conference that they have acquired Town Crier, which is the first working approach for trusted execution environment (TEE)-based smart contracts, built by the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3), which includes researchers and professors from Cornell Tech and Cornell University. Chainlink says that they will oversee all future development of the technology.
What is Town Crier?
Town Crier is the world’s leading trusted hardware-based oracle system. Following this acquisition, Chainlink, the foremost decentralized system for providing smart contracts with external data, will integrate the Town Crier technology into their decentralized oracle network. The combination of these two leading projects creates a clear technical leader for securely providing smart contracts with the key external inputs they need to function.
Ari Juels, the co-director of Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts and former Chief Scientist at RSA said in their announcement that, “Chainlink is the most qualified team to seize the baton and bring Town Crier to the next stage of development. I’m confident that Chainlink’s leadership will result in high production quality, a raft of new features, and greatly improved usability. Integration of Town Crier into the Chainlink platform will help solve the vital problem of smart contract connectivity by bolstering both data integrity and query confidentiality.”
As the world’s leading developer of decentralized oracles, Chainlink provides reliable inputs and outputs for smart contracts on any blockchain. Smart contracts provide the ability to execute tamper-proof digital agreements, which are considered highly secure and highly reliable. In order to maintain a contract’s overall reliability, the inputs and outputs that a contract relies on also need to be secure. Chainlink provides a reliable connection to external data, allowing smart contracts to act on and generate useful events in the real world.
Sergey Nazarov, CEO of Chainlink said in the announcement: “We’re thrilled to take over development of Town Crier and incorporate it into Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network. Working with Ari Juels and everyone at Cornell has been an immense pleasure for our entire team, and we look forward to working together with them and the rest of the academic security research community to create secure smart contracts that can meaningfully react to and affect key events outside of their own network.”
Additionally he told Forbes, “the acquisition of Town Crier by Chainlink focused on us integrating Town Crier into Chainlink, and taking over the development of Town Crier in it’s V2 form, with the help of great people like Ari and other folks at Cornell/IC3. The further development goals are to expand the features/usability of Town Crier, by connecting it together with the many great features we already have in Chainlink, while continuing to improve on its security in a Town Crier V2 release we’re working on, to make it an even better version of the great approach that Ari and the very smart folks at Cornell came up with.”