RioDeFi has announced its latest integration, and it may be its most important yet. A deal with Chainlink will see price feeds, derived from decentralized oracles, embedded in the RioDeFi ecosystem. These will support an array of financial services built into dApps such as RioPay, RioWallet and RioExchange.
Chainlink’s smart oracles are used by companies both within and outside of the blockchain space, supplying data on the price of global markets and even on the outcome of sporting events and elections. Its most popular product within the DeFi space, however, has been its Price Feeds, described as "the largest collection of tamperproof, on-chain price reference data available." With more than $4 billion of DeFi value now secured by Chainlink oracles, the project is a major player in the rapidly evolving decentralized finance space.
Bridging the Old World and the New
RioDeFi was founded with the goal of bridging the traditional financial world and that of crypto, enabling DeFi users to enjoy the benefits of both. It was for this reason that RioDefi chose Polkadot’s interoperable and highly scalable framework to build upon. Rio’s engineers are focused on making it as easy as possible for new users to be onboarded and start interacting with DeFi products for saving, lending and staking. In the world that RioDeFi is developing, transaction fees are low, confirmations are near-instant, and global access to financial services is assured.
RioDeFi’s ambitious goal of onboarding the masses to DeFi can’t be created in a vacuum, however, and thus it is compelled to integrate with tech companies that can provide the final pieces to the puzzle – starting with Chainlink. The number and nature of companies Chainlink has partnered with is too extensive to list, but includes Google, SWIFT, Aave and Loopring. Its oracles are already in use by Polkadot and Substrate, the Rust-based programming language on which its parachains are built.
How Chainlink Oracles Reduce Deployment Time
A key, and often overlooked, benefit of integrating Chainlink oracles is that it enables blockchains to go to market quicker. Or to be precise, it enables them to start delivering practical products and services quicker. While it’s possible for blockchain developers to create their own oracles, the process can be time-consuming, and the cost of failure, manifested in the form of pricing errors and smart contract exploits, is punitively high. It’s no surprise, therefore, that most blockchains settle for the simpler and safer option of partnering with a reliable oracle provider.
Chainlink isn’t the only blockchain oracle specialist – Band Protocol also has a strong presence within the space – but it’s the largest and most qualified. Developers can connect to Chainlink’s open APIs and then start creating dApps that draw data from other blockchains or even from traditional markets, paving the way for the creation of synthetic assets, prediction markets, and much more. Although payments and DeFi are the initial use cases for RioDeFi, there are plans in place to roll out on-chain games, each of which will also benefit from access to Chainlink’s versatile oracles.