Two leading Tezos (XTZ) teams, SmartPy and Cryptonomic, are making Chainlink (Link) oracles natively available on the Tezos network.

The two teams received a grant from the Tezos Foundation to integrate Chainlink oracles into Tezos smart contracts. Cryptonomic co-founder Vishakh told Cointelegraph that their work has filled a key missing link within the Tezos ecosystem:

“Most of our core team has worked in finance for multiple years, especially derivatives finance. We’ve worked on mission-critical systems that handle very high notional financial trades. So that's why we're really attracted to Tezos because of on-chain governance and formal verification. But one missing piece of the puzzle, there have to be external inputs in order to build successful Tezos DeFi applications.”

An oracle is a prerequisite for decentralized finance

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov echoed the same sentiment, noting the importance of resilient data feeds for the decentralized finance — or DeFi — space:

“I think it's going to be used a lot for DeFi, maybe some decentralized insurance. But from what I can tell, there's a lot of interest in having DeFi on Tezos. And having a good oracle mechanism is basically now a prerequisite for having a well functioning DeFi application. And I think people are starting to realize that building oracle mechanisms is akin to building a blockchain.”

Nazarov said that the integration between the two crypto unicorns benefits other projects as well:

“It's a network effect that compels data providers to put data on-chain because there's more of a market share that they get access to with one integration. And while we will be on multiple chains, every additional chain that we're on creates a benefit to all the other chains, because now data providers have more of a market to sell data to.”

This news comes a day after an early Chainlink investor predicted that the price of Link will soon exceed $25 and Chainlink will overtake Ether (ETH) in market capitalization.

Recent vulnerabilities demonstrated by various DeFi projects seem to indicate that Chainlink will not run out of companies in search of an oracle.