Original text: "Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin?" Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov｜Crypto Big Guy》
Author: Mao Taojun
Just this past December 2022, the blockchain oracle network Chainlink launched a staking function to help improve the economic security of the platform’s oracle services.
In an announcement sent to Cointelegraph, Chainlink said the new staking functionality is an integral part of its “Chainlink Economics 2.0” efforts focused on security and sustainable growth. You must know that before this, if you want to receive Chainlink (LINK) token rewards from Chainlink, users need to start their own nodes.
“As the network continues to expand, Chainlink Staking will continue to evolve and provide enhanced security in our ecosystem and throughout Web3.” Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said that this launch is the foundation of Chainlink Economics 2.0, which will eventually Complete.
Initially launched as a v0.1 beta, Chainlink Staking includes a stake pool designed to secure the ETH/USD data feed within the Ethereum mainnet. Chainlink started rising on the eve of the launch of staking functionality for LINK tokens. This seems to indicate overtly and covertly that the launch of the staking function will boost the demand for LINK tokens and platform oracle services among currency circles.
Who is Sergey Nazarov? Why is his Chainlink so famous in the currency circle and regarded as the most successful oracle today? In the past few years, the cryptocurrency community has been searching for Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin, and some reports have gradually increased speculation that Sergey may be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. In this issue of the Reconstruction Encryption Boss series launched by the Reconstruction Institute, we bring you Sergey Nazarov, who was once speculated to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
From Lego to Bitcoin
According to the current definition of Sergey Nazarov, he is most often defined as a Russian entrepreneur. In cryptocurrency circles, he is best known for co-founding the successful Chainlink and SmartContract projects that are transforming the cryptocurrency industry. In particular, LINK’s oracles are critical to the functionality of DeFi and Web3.
We have searched for a lot of information to bring you more detailed information about Sergey Nazarov, but it is not easy to fully understand Sergey Nazarov’s identity. The Chainlink founder doesn’t talk much about himself and he has never revealed his place and date of birth. However, what is known is that he is a Russian immigrant living in the United States.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, he moved with his family from Russia to New York. His parents are engineers, and Sergey has been exposed to computer technology since he was a child, either intentionally or indirectly. This family atmosphere also led to his passion for strategy video games. During his childhood, he became interested again in how cathode ray televisions worked, taking them apart and putting them back together like Lego blocks, another of his hobbies.
Just when everyone thought that he would inherit his childhood hobbies in his later studies, this "technical education" was not reflected in his later university studies. Instead, he obtained a degree from New York University (NYU). Degrees in Philosophy and Management.
After college, Sergey stayed in an academic environment, working as an associate professor at the Stern School of Business with Lawrence Lenihan. Lawrence is not only a professor, he also has another important identity-the CEO of a venture capital company. As an intern at the company, Sergey participated in multiple successful investment rounds, including investments in Pinterest and Riot Games.
This early experience prepared Sergey for working with QED Capital. QED Capital is another venture capital firm that spans Russia and the United States. At the same time, Sergey’s Russian heritage and experience somehow connect him to Satoshi Nakamoto. The surge to $30 in July 2011 prompted QED to conduct research on cryptocurrencies, specifically mining. Sergey also officially started to get involved with Bitcoin, and he followed suit and started generating Bitcoin blocks in cloud mining.
Entering the realm of oracles: Chainlink
Sergey founded a platform called “SmartContract” in 2014, only two years after the release of Bitcoin, when even Ethereum did not exist. In a way, Sergey’s work laid the foundation for this great tool that allows cryptocurrencies to execute code when certain conditions are met. However, Sergey soon realized that smart contracts should not be limited to information on the blockchain, as this greatly reduced its possibilities. This directly led to the creation of Chainlink, a centralized oracle system.
In 2016, he proposed a solution that attempted to solve the problem with something he called an "oracle." While the idea of designing an oracle was revolutionary and a big step forward, Sergey quickly realized that the solutions that existed at the time were centralized. At that time, when we wanted to obtain information, everyone's first reaction was to look for it in a very specific place, such as a database.
However, there is a huge problem with this approach: the risk of information manipulation. Indeed, if the oracle is looking for information from the wrong source, or if it is maliciously modified, the information transmitted on the blockchain will therefore be incorrect. This will cause the smart contract to run with incorrect information and thus fail to provide reliable results.
To solve this problem, he decided to create the Chainlink project, a decentralized oracle network. In 2017, the product was reinvented into what we now know as Chainlink Network.
Due to internal mechanisms, external information is transmitted by multiple oracles and compared with each other, they are analyzed and aggregated in order to give results that are as close to reality as possible. Good oracles will gain a better reputation and greater rewards, while those who want to play tricks on it and be clever will be punished, and in serious cases they may even be kicked out of the system.
Oracle: Will it become an essential tool for the development of the blockchain industry?
Sergey was one of the first people to come up with the idea of smart contracts, and then oracles. He could also realize that for reliability reasons it was necessary to decentralize the oracles in order to provide the most reliable information possible. It is obvious that Sergey’s series of actions have promoted changes in the face of the currency circle, allowing the currency circle to make more contributions to the entire society.
Sergey’s creation is a very meaningful thing for the entire cryptocurrency industry. If smart contracts are to be a revolution, allowing lines of code to run automatically when certain conditions are met, then the information must already be on the blockchain.
Obtaining information outside the blockchain in a reliable way and integrating it to predict all possibilities opens up new ideas for many applications. For example, let’s say an airline wants to compensate customers after a two-hour delay. At this time, by programming the smart contract and linking it with the oracle, the oracle will be able to determine whether the plane is delayed and allow automatic refunds.
Through the above examples, we can see that Chainlink’s oracle system can connect the real world with the blockchain world. Of course, businesses need to start taking an interest in the technology and gradually start rolling it out on a large scale. But in the long run, there is no reason why smart contracts related to oracles cannot be used by everyone, companies, and even national organizations.
Chainlink 2.0 will make it possible to create hybrid smart contracts that can access off-chain resources. Additionally, the new approach will make it easier for oracles to “arbitrate off-chain oracle conflicts.”
However, this rapid success, coupled with the wait-and-see mentality surrounding Chainlink, has also caused some concerns in the currency circle. On the one hand, Buterin, for example, says the system lacks a consistent way to punish flawed data providers. On the other hand, Eric Wall of Arcane Assets has also been critical of Chainlink. In May 2021, he stated that the network was not “cryptoeconomically secure,” citing the status of the developers and the fact that the model relied on trusted systems.
While critics have expressed concerns about the space, it's hard to argue that Chainlink hasn't built product-market fit yet. After all, scalability and security are the most significant advantages claimed by Chainlink 2.0.
Sergey is optimistic about the cross-chain cooperation between Chainlink and SWIFT
When there is controversy, there is a topic. Chainlink is the oracle project with the largest market capitalization and total guaranteed value, and there are many crypto projects related to it.
On September 28, 2022, Sergey and SWIFT’s Strategy Director Jonathan Ehrenfeld Solé announced the project cooperation at the SmartCon 2022 conference. Chainlink and SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, have partnered on a cross-chain crypto transfer project in an attempt to bridge the gap between traditional banks and blockchain.
Solé said at the conference that “institutional investors have an undeniable interest in digital assets,” adding that these traditional financial players want to access digital and traditional assets on one platform.
The SWIFT interbank messaging system is the most widely used platform for traditional cross-border fiat currency transactions, connecting more than 11,000 banks around the world. You know, as early as August 2022, the system was already recording an average of 44.8 million messages every day.
However, transactions on the SWIFT network can take days to complete, and the company has also been exploring blockchain and DLT technologies as well as central bank digital currencies (CBDC) to facilitate faster payments.
Sergey said that Chainlink is an easy-to-integrate system. Help is always available for teams who want to integrate their applications with Chainlink and need customized support.
The POC utilizes Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to allow SWIFT messages to indicate token transfers in almost every blockchain network, which Sergey said will accelerate the adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT) blockchains in capital markets and traditional finance. On the other hand, Chainlink said that this collaboration with SWIFT enables financial institutions to gain blockchain capabilities without having to replace, develop, and integrate new connections into legacy systems, which it said would require extensive modifications at an “abnormally high” cost.
In the opinion of most currency circles, the services provided by Sergey’s Chainlink belong to a specific niche market, because oracles essentially cater to all blockchains that use smart contracts, making the services of platforms like Chainlink ideal for them. Operations are important. Companies from both traditional backgrounds and the crypto space believe that smart contracts have considerable significance, and this significance will only grow in the future.
The first piece of evidence linking Sergey to the speculation that he may be Satoshi Nakamoto originated from reddit: the Internet domain name smartcontract.com was purchased by Sergey on October 25, 2008, which happened to be 6 days before the release of the Bitcoin white paper. sky. So much so that later, the correspondence between the initials S and N of the two names was also added as one of the evidences that it was Satoshi Nakamoto. And later, Sergey used the same geographical location as Satoshi Nakamoto, which became one of the evidences for this speculation.
However, it is obviously not enough to prove that Sergey is Satoshi Nakamoto based on these subtle evidences, but just such coincidences are enough to arouse the interest of the currency circle in the speculation that Sergey may be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Sergey himself also said: "I don't know who it is, but if I had to guess, it's probably a group of people."
For Sergey, what excites him most about cryptocurrencies is that they fundamentally change the way the world works.
In his view, today's booms and busts in financial markets are based on information asymmetries, which benefit a very small number of people who can take advantage of them, while the rest of society has to foot the bill. This is wrong and must change. of.
At the same time, the majority of users in emerging markets still lack the basic economic protocols of contract systems. The application of hybrid smart contracts can bring people in other parts of the world from 0 to 1. This may be his most worthwhile endeavor in the currency circle. The goal to strive for.
At this point, it is no longer that important whether Sergey is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Although Chainlink is highly optimistic, price predictions cannot replace due diligence and research. After all, Chainlink doesn’t produce blocks, just “consensus on a network of hundreds of oracles regarding price data.”
