Chainlink, which supports nearly a thousand oracle networks, has revealed details and a roadmap of its upcoming staking program. In an official blog post, Chainlink highlighted that it’s important to further scale the security of the platform to match the increasing amount of value within Chainlink-powered applications.
It described staking as a key mechanism to bring a new layer of crypto economic security to Chainlink. The platform’s overarching mission is to give ecosystem participants the ability to increase security guarantees. It gives users assurances of oracle services by backing them with staked LINK tokens. The staking of LINK empowers nodes to receive jobs and earn corresponding fees within the Chainlink Network.
Through this, Chainlink will be introducing a powerful incentive and penalty mechanism for its nodes to consistently generate accurate oracle reports. Basically, staking serves as a larger defense-in-depth approach to Chainlink security. It already includes a multitude of other key safeguards including decentralization, cryptography, future fee opportunity, implicit incentives, and modular configurability. The increase in oracle security and user assurance, via staking, will be key in helping the multi-chain smart contract economy to secure multi-trillion-dollar markets across major global industries.
Moreover, Chainlink wants to empower a greater number of community members to directly participate in its network. It will help them stake their LINK tokens to support the performance of oracle networks. Stakers can raise alerts if they believe an oracle service has not met predefined performance standards. They can earn a reward for timely and valid alerts. This plays an important role in further decentralizing the Chainlink Network.
Furthermore, it helps Chainlink emerge as a robust reputation system and slashing mechanism. Stakers also get to benefit from an initiative – Partner Growth Program – where Chainlinked protocols and DAOs provide various incentives to speed up the growth and bring about cross-ecosystem participation.
