The Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional and accessible Chainlink Network. We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program here, or if you are a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us.

We’re excited to announce that BlockSpaces and LinkUp Florida have been selected as joint recipients of a blockchain integration grant from the Chainlink Community Grant Program. BlockSpaces and LinkUp are receiving a grant for a native mainnet integration of Chainlink on the NEAR blockchain to support its many developers wanting to build decentralized applications using Chainlink oracles.

Through a native integration of Chainlink, NEAR developers will have built-in access to the Chainlink protocol, including existing solutions already in production like the widely used Chainlink Price Feeds, as well as a generalized oracle solution for creating custom oracle networks that connect to a wide array off-chain resources. This grant is meant to accelerate the development of DeFi, insurance, gaming, and a variety of other advanced smart contract applications on the NEAR blockchain, without any cross-dependencies on other blockchain networks.

As part of the grant, BlockSpaces and LinkUp Florida will collaborate on providing several key components to the integration, including:

• Validate and adapt Chainlink contracts to ensure native compatibility with NEAR
• Test and deploy all components to NEAR, with continual maintenance and upgrades
• Deliver a monitoring solution for Chainlink nodes operating on NEAR

BlockSpaces is a blockchain solution provider dedicated to accelerating enterprise blockchain adoption. Combining advisory, technical functionality, and industry focused infrastructure support with its core platform, BlockSpaces Connect™, BlockSpaces provides business value to an ecosystem of client innovators. BlockSpaces is involved in several enterprise blockchain consortiums including an IBM registered business partner, an R3 Corda technology partner, and a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, among others. It has also been contracted out to develop several blockchain projects such as for enterprises issuing health credentials, building DID solutions, and constructing digital asset solutions.

NEAR Protocol is a public proof-of-stake blockchain built using a novel consensus mechanism called Doomslug. NEAR Protocol uses sharding to split up network computation so it can be run in parallel, which increases throughput and allows the network to scale up as the number of nodes on it increases. Developers can also run Ethereum dApps on NEAR with EVM and transfer Ethereum assets to the NEAR blockchain via The Rainbow Bridge, which supports tokens (ERC20, ERC721) and Solidity contracts.

“We’re excited to be awarded a grant to bring Chainlink on to the NEAR blockchain, providing NEAR developers with native access to its market-leading oracle solutions and technology,” stated Rosa Shores, Co-Founder and CEO of BlockSpaces. “Being a highly experienced team that has built numerous blockchain solutions, we look forward to integrating Chainlink directly into the NEAR mainnet, allowing developers to build smart contract applications connected to a wide variety of off-chain resources without sacrificing on security or reliability.”

LinkUp Florida is a blockchain consulting group highly focused on accelerating smart contract adoption by connecting enterprise systems to distributed ledger technologies and developing innovative solutions for the Chainlink ecosystem. LinkUp leverages a cross-functional team of experts who are passionate about building out the Chainlink ecosystem and supporting the needs of the community as a whole. LinkUp’s aim is to provide staking services for the Chainlink Network, Node-As-A-Service management, custom enterprise integrations, custom external adapters, and general consulting for smart contract and blockchain-based technologies.

“We are excited to be integrating Chainlink into NEAR, allowing developers to combine the use of memory-safe smart contracts with robust and decentralized data feeds to enable exciting new financial applications,” stated LinkUp Co-Founder Kyle Santiago. As the integration progresses, more features will become available for use by NEAR developers, starting with decentralized price feeds, but eventually other notable Chainlink features such as verifiable randomness generated from Chainlink VRF, which opens the doors for probably fair rewards in games and lottery protocols.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams and researchers who are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of universally connected smart contracts and secure oracle networks. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make universally connected smart contracts into the dominant form of digital agreement.

About the Chainlink Grant Program

If you want to learn more about the Grant Program, check out our recent blog post that further expands upon its goals and the criteria for submission. If you would like to participate in the Chainlink Grant Program, please apply here. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in Cash and/or LINK.