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The beta release of Chainlink Functions on Avalanche will help anyone to easily connect a smart contract to any Web2 API

BARCELONA, Spain, May 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ava Labs, today announced the beta release of Chainlink Functionsa serverless developer platform that empowers anyone to easily connect a smart contract to any Web2 APIon Avalanche Fuji testnet. Developers on Avalanche can now leverage Chainlink's highly secure and reliable network to seamlessly build new and more advanced Web3 applications.

Chainlink Functions unlocks an entirely new frontier of Web3 and Web2 integrations. Until now, Web3 developers couldn't connect their smart contracts to existing Web2 APIs to access social media signals, AI computation, messaging services, and more. Conversely, Web2 developers couldn't leverage their existing infrastructure when getting started building a Web3 app. Chainlink Functions provides this key piece of missing infrastructure developers need to build sophisticated applications that take advantage of the best of both worlds.

"The integration of Chainlink Functions unlocks a multitude of new and exciting smart contract use cases for the Avalanche ecosystem as it simplifies the developer experience of connecting Web3 apps with Web2 data sources," said John Nahas, Vice President of Business Development at Ava Labs. "Developers can now connect their smart contract to any Web2 API in minutes to unlock the next big use case for Web3 while taking advantage of both the proven security and reliability of the Chainlink Network."

Chainlink Functions acts as a decentralized compute runtime to test, simulate, and run custom logic off-chain for Web3 applicationsakin to a more trust-minimized and blockchain-enabled version of existing cloud-based serverless solutions such as AWS Lambda, GCP CloudFunctions, and Cloudflare Workers. By taking advantage of the blockchain industry's most time-tested infrastructure for oracle connectivity and computation, developers can focus on their decentralized applications while being able to rely on the connectivity, security, and reliability of the Chainlink Network. Furthermore, Chainlink Functions is a truly self-serve platform, meaning developers can fulfill their external data and compute needs without having to interface with node operators.

"We're excited to expand the suite of Web3 services available on Avalanche to include Chainlink Functions, empowering Avalanche developers to connect their smart contracts to existing Web2 APIs," said Kemal El Moujahid, Chief Product Officer at Chainlink Labs. "The seamless connectivity of Chainlink Functions makes it easy for developers to combine smart contracts with powerful Web2 APIs and data sources to unlock a new frontier of exciting capabilities and applications."

Smart contract developers building on Avalanche can now use Chainlink Functions to easily connect Web2 APIs and cloud services in their smart contracts. Chainlink Functions can also be combined with other high-quality Chainlink services available on Avalanche, including Chainlink Data Feeds, Chainlink VRF, and Chainlink Automation.

If you're a developer and would like to access the beta version of Chainlink Functions, sign up here. Also, check out the Chainlink Functions developer documentation and join the Chainlink Discord for any technical questions or feedback.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry-standard Web3 services platform and has enabled trillions of dollars in transaction volume across DeFi, insurance, gaming, NFTs, and other major industries. As the leading decentralized oracle network, Chainlink enables developers to build feature-rich Web3 applications with seamless access to real-world data and off-chain computation across any blockchain and provides global enterprises with a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.

About Ava Labs

Ava Labs makes it simple to launch decentralized finance applications on Avalanche, the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry. We are empowering people to easily and freely digitize all the world's assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform.

Ava Labs was founded by Cornell computer scientists who brought on talent from Wall Street to execute their vision. The company has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform built to scale infinitely and finalize transactions in under a second. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and eco-friendly. Build anything you want, any way you want, on a blockchain designed for both Web3 devs and businesses. Don't believe it? Try an app on Avalanche today.

SOURCE Chainlink; Ava Labs

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Chainlink Functions Is Now Live on Avalanche Fuji Testnet, Helping ... - PR Newswire

The Blockchain is becoming an essential part of the financial sector. Encryption is the reason behind its security. The transaction records are linked with the previous records on a distributed ledger. It means the new block of information is joined with prior blocks. This makes it nearly impossible for the hacker to hack it. The hacker will have to change the whole chain. Nobody can temper the data as they are interconnected.

To provide more clarity on this, the experts say that the blockchain cannot be hacked but blockchain related processes can be hacked. Like, the transactions made through blockchain can be exploited. Similarly, blockchain assets can be stolen.

There are two types of blockchain: public blockchain and private blockchain. Public blockchains permit anyone to join and remain anonymous. Whereas Private blockchain requires identity to confirm the privileges and can allow the known organizations to join. Fraudsters may attack using phishing attacks, routing attacks, sybil attacks, 51% attacks.

Data shows that the blockchain hacks that have happened in recent years on centralized exchanges. The hackers can get access to the digital assets through an exchange network or platform. For example, Bitcoin is decentralized, means no one can govern and so no one can hack but once we put the asset in exchange the place can be uncovered to hackers.

Revealed by many, verified ownership models is another way to hack the blockchains. In a given blockchain, the integrity of transactions is supported by the community of owners. If one owner gets control of more than 50%, then all sorts of things can be done.

This is challenging in reality as the attacker needs a lot of time even after taking command on over half the nodes. The other form of attack known as sybil attack where people create their fake identities but still they cant fulfill the 51% holding blockchain strategy.

The new changes like the smart contract makes blockchain even more secure. Smart contracts help to put data and code executions on the blockchain. It has become more and more popular these days. Blockchain can not be hacked but the smart contracts can be exploited and if it is placed on blockchain then it is supposed to hack the blockchain.

The human aspect cannot be neglected. Better understand it as social engineering. If anyone uses the public WiFi and sends the crypto keys over that network then someone may steal your crypto then this is also not a blockchain hack.

So, whenever hearing about blockchain hacking, be aware that it is not a blockchain hack but it is related to the ways we are dealing with the blockchains. Blockchain itself is very resistant. Blockchains are very difficult to hack and so it is less susceptible to cyber attacks. Hence, stolen keys and code exploitation are the two very basic reasons for blockchain hacking.

For more security control, specifics are-secure communication, privacy of data, access and security management, key management. These are some stated security measures.

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Blockchain Nearly Impossible to Hack - Reasons and Clarity - The Coin Republic

The Swiss startup Chain4Travel has announced the launch of the Camino Network mainnet, a public but permissioned blockchain designed for the global travel industry. The company says that the network is backed by major airlines like Lufthansa, Eurowings, Hahn Air, plus a host of other hotel and car rental chains. The projects goal is to make the travel industry more efficient by using blockchain to build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps) that would improve interoperability between the various participants.

The Camino Network is built as a permissioned blockchain, which literally means that you need to obtain permission to build smart contracts on it or become a validator. This is opposed to permissionless open blockchains like Ethereum (ETH-USD), where theres a strong ethos of allowing anyone to access them. Camino Network is aimed at enterprises, so its not surprising that it is permissioned, as its built to serve a specific use case for large companies.

Open blockchains allow anyone to use them, including a small portion of criminals thats not something that Lufthansa or any other participant in the network would tolerate.

Enterprise blockchains are not new, with several initiatives like IBMs (NYSE:IBM) Hyperledger or R3 Corda being available on the market for many years, especially during the blockchain craze of 2017-2018, when people thought that anything put on a blockchain is instantly 100 times better. Corda and Hyperledger were examples of fully-private blockchains, which cannot be used or even analyzed by anyone outside of its restricted set of participants (which were large corporations).

Private enterprise blockchains never really fulfilled the hype, primarily because once you take out the public and permissionless aspects of a blockchain, youre mostly just left with a very slow and clunky database. Camino Network is still public, though, which is different from many previous attempts at similar things. This means that anyone can check the activity and use the chain, which makes the system much more transparent.

Indeed, Camino Network is also aimed at the end users, with future dApps on the network enabling things like streamlined payments, reconciliation (refunds), as well as tokenized loyalty programs and tickets (which could potentially be resold). Building dApps on the network is generally open to anyone, but the team will ask for know-your-client or know-your-business checks from anyone deploying smart contracts or validating the network.

Over 80 key players in the travel sector, including airlines, tech providers, and operators, have enrolled as trusted validators for the Camino Network. Validators must stake 100,000 CAM tokens, providing them with voting privileges concerning the networks governance.

A select group of validators is currently participating in the mainnets soft launch, with the goal of evaluating the network and its initial dApps in a real-world scenario. Following the completion of this test period, any remaining validators will be rapidly integrated, ensuring that the network is prepared for widespread use by June 2023.

The global travel industry is unquestionably one of the most important elements of todays economy, accounting for more than 10% of global GDP before the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the industry is also old and often relies on outdated and proprietary technology platforms and numerous bilateral licensing agreements.

The Camino Network aims to address this by rethinking the structure from the ground up, enabling next-generation decentralized applications and services built on a global and largely open network. As a consortium validated by participants of the industry, it can become a central place to build interoperable apps.

The Camino Network has been operational in testnet since Q2 of 2022, undergoing an extensive testing process before its launch. This includes an audit of its source code, smart contracts, and infrastructure components by cybersecurity firm Hexens, which has previously audited projects like Polygons (MATIC-USD) zkEVM, 1inch, and TON (previously known as Telegram Open Network).

Chain4Travel, the company behind Camino Network, says that over 120 industry participants are participating and backing the project, while the company has also received over 10 million CHF in funding. Blockchain initiatives dealing with the real world have often struggled to gain traction, usually because the teams behind them were unable to make headway in the relatively closed world of traditional corporations. Often, the solutions were simply unneeded and uninteresting to either the enterprises that needed to adopt them or their customers.

Still, initiatives like loyalty points or gamification are being adopted by a number of brands through companies like Lolli. Overall, Camino Network has the ingredients to buck the trend of enterprise blockchain initiatives, but only time will tell if they will.

Disclosure

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Chain4Travel Launches Camino Network to Implement Web3 in the ... - TipRanks

The March collapse of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature three of the worlds most crypto friendly lenders left a massive hole in the digital asset financial system.

But with blockchain offering a potential route into global finance for parts of the world previously excluded, among myriad other use cases, Standard Chartereds crypto research chief Geoff Kendrick believes that the worlds largest banks owe it to potential customers in developing economies to fill the void left in crypto.

Kendrick talked to Forkasts Jenny Ortiz-Bolivar about the worlds vast unbanked space and why his bank, Standard Chartered, has adopted a proactive approach to digital assets.

The Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Jenny Ortiz-Bolivar: Standard Chartered Banks approach to crypto is much more open to blockchain and crypto technology in comparison to competitors such as HSBC. What exactly is driving that approach?

Geoff Kendrick: Obviously, I cant speak to our competitors in terms of their desire when it comes to crypto. But on the SCB side, we have been relatively early to this space. We recognize the importance of blockchain technology. We recognize the importance of this broader ecosystem to, quite frankly, a lot of our core businesses in terms of financial markets globally. I would say that, over the next 5 to 10 years, the blockchain is going to become a much more important part of financial markets and SCB is at the forefront of that shift.

Our core footprint as a bank is in emerging Asia, emerging Africa, and the Middle East. For those regions, some of the core digital asset use cases, and those of Bitcoin and other transactional coins in particular, are incredibly important. In those regions, there are still many individuals and companies that dont have access to a broader financial asset ecosystem of the kind available in the West. In those countries, alternative financial outcomes are potentially advantageous. Theres therefore a natural overlap between some of our core countries and where Bitcoin and other digital assets can help.

Story continues

Ortiz-Bolivar: In that regard, how do you view the role of blockchain and crypto in the future of banking? What synergies are we likely to see?

Kendrick: In terms of blockchains future, there are a number of potential use cases. At one end of the use case spectrum, we have the World Bank telling us that the global unbanked sector has transactions of roughly US$20 trillion a year. As mentioned, quite a lot of that transaction space is unbanked because financial institutions are not available in quite a few of those core countries.

If you think about taking those transactions into the blockchain space via Bitcoin or an equivalent using multiples from Visa and MasterCard, for example, even that could get you to a valuation of Bitcoin at around US$50,000. Thats roughly double where weve been recently. So, through the blockchain, those in emerging markets a huge unbanked space can access a financial system that theyve otherwise been excluded from.

Elsewhere, I think well see a continuation of what traditional financial institutions have already been doing to migrate to blockchain over time. Here Im thinking about insurance type services. You could imagine they could be offered medium term on blockchain and therefore cheaper because theres less people in the chain. Similarly, ETF (exchange Traded Fund) type products could end up on blockchain. Essentially the potential use cases are endless when you consider the types of smart contracts Ethereum and others are able to offer.

Ortiz-Bolivar: Finally, this year has seen the collapse of a trio of crypto-friendly banks, starting with Silvergate in early March. Those closures have left a critical gap in the crypto ecosystem. What is Standard Chartered doing to fill that void?

Kendrick: Those banks were, like you say, very important parts of the crypto ecosystem and we need larger, longer term financial players like Standard Chartered to step into this space. Over the last six months or so, weve also seen concerns around centralized exchanges, most notably the FTX collapse in November. Again, I think that presents an opportunity for banks like Standard Chartered to offer broader trading and custody services.

Players like ourselves that have been in other financial spaces for a long time have a lot of the plumbing around these custody and other solutions that are required in the medium term for crypto to grow. Its time for us to make the step into this space. Over time that will probably lead to an inflow of institutional money, allowing crypto assets and Bitcoin in particular to become much more mainstream.

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Largest banks should fill void left in crypto following collapses, says Standard Chartereds Geoff Kendrick - Yahoo Finance

The 2020 pandemic has had a strong impact as an accelerator of digital transformation, as well as the adoption of new production and relationship habits between people thanks to connectivity. Within a few months, companies of all kinds, public and private, have had to respond to an unprecedented crisis. An acceleration that many experts put at the equivalent of a five-year leap.

Technology has become a key element of economic recovery, supporting disruptive innovation and all the new connected devices and services, such as process automation or remote working, that are having a major impact on different sectors and areas of society.

A technology is considered to be disruptive if it succeeds in bringing about a major change in the processes and mechanisms that preceded its emergence, as well as a change in user behaviour.

A disruptive technology offers a new tool that has the enormous capacity to completely change peoples lives, and when such a technology emerges, it can create a new market with its own values and risks.

These innovations are implemented in areas with established patterns and succeed in changing the management of organisations and the way they respond to user demands, eventually replacing the previous technologies altogether.

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen introduced the term disruptive technology in his article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave published in 1995. However, it was not until 1997, in his best-selling book The Innovators Dilemma, that he really explored the disruptive innovation theory.

For Christensen, disruption starts with innovation that addresses the concerns of an unsophisticated group of consumers, or takes into account certain characteristics that only a few appreciate.

Something disruptive is something that breaks or bursts abruptly. In the case of disruptive technologies, they are also characterised by their simplicity, accessibility and affordability, and they coexist with previous technologies for a time before eventually replacing them completely.

In many cases, the design and development of these new tools and services starts in an innovation department or a start-up, they are brought to market, and their use becomes widespread, ultimately creating a new business model. But until it is fully implemented, companies and users have to go through a period of adaptation. Meanwhile, the process of creating disruptive technologies often leads to new businesses, such as the iPhone, launched by technology company Apple in 2007, which revolutionised the use of the internet on mobile phones.

And while not all innovations are ultimately successful, they do force the market to try to improve its products and services, and force companies to focus on developing innovative strategies, which has a positive impact on users. In this context, there are companies that adapt smoothly to disruptive technologies and others that are forced by technology to change.

The benefits of these innovations include the development of new business models and the ability to reach previously inaccessible markets, turning disruption into opportunity.

Embracing disruptive technologies saves companies money by allowing them to enter the market with cheaper products and services, such as robotics and process automation, because they help increase productivity by moving away from strategies and structures that are outdated and inflexible to the needs of an ever-changing global marketplace.

They also allow companies to find niches in the market where they can respond to needs that other companies are not able to meet, to create new business models for doing so, and to quickly identify areas where it is possible or necessary to improve.

Currently, one of the most disruptive technologies, and one of the most advanced and prominent, is AI. It solves problems through computation, just as a human would, and its applications span all sectors, as it can automate and help optimise processes such as traffic management or data collection through chatbots. Robots, autonomous cars, smart cities and personal assistants are already using its many applications.

Another technology that has become popular following cryptocurrencies is called Blockchain . Experts believe that Blockchain will transform many sectors such as finance, collecting and crypto art, smart contracts and cybersecurity, as well as online commerce, as it is a highly reliable and secure system for recording transactions and tracking assets.

One of the disruptive technologies of the moment is Big Data, which is capable of collecting and analysing large amounts of data. Data is one of the great treasures of Industry (and Society 4.0), the result of connectivity and the development of other tools such as the Internet of Things (IoT). In the industrial sector, mass data analysis helps to reduce costs and save time, improving processes and eliminating errors, thanks to real-time information that enables quick decisions at critical moments. It is particularly used for trending and predictive maintenance of machinery.

Cloud Computing is another example of disruption and connectivity. Above all, cloud services bring flexibility and security to businesses, supporting new aspects such as hybrid and remote working models. It has helped organisations to rapidly modernise their IT applications, enabling them, among other things, to scale their infrastructures at a lower cost and increase the agility of their management: data storage, backup and total information accessibility.

All of this has been possible thanks to the deployment of the 5G network, which is capable of supporting todays connectivity needs: download speeds up to 100 times faster than the 4G network, latency of no more than 4 milliseconds, and the global capacity to connect thousands of devices simultaneously in a very small space.

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What are disruptive technologies and what are the benefits? - Telefnica