The Chainlink Community Grant Program provides financial resources to the many development teams and researchers building a more functional, accessible, and socially impactful Chainlink Network. Our next grant has been awarded to Protofire, a provider of blockchain development services, to natively integrate Chainlink oracles into the mobile-first blockchain platform Celo. The grant will go toward supporting hybrid smart contract applications built on Celo’s global payments infrastructure. Most notably, it will establish support for Chainlink Price Feeds, ready-made decentralized oracle networks that supply dApps with high-quality, up-to-date financial market data on-chain in a tamper-proof manner.

Having direct access to Chainlink Price Feeds will enable Celo developers to build DeFi applications dependent on global exchange rates, ensuring users can accept payments in a variety of cryptocurrencies. Chainlink Price Feeds not only enhance the security of Celo’s stablecoins, but can also be used with new financial products like lending/borrowing, asset management, remittances, and more. Additionally, Chainlink oracles have broader functionality, such as verifying the completion of external events before executing payments. This can be used for a variety of use cases, like confirming microtasks before triggering payouts or determining weather conditions for parametric crop insurance settlements.

As part of the grant, Protofire will provide several key components to the integration, including:

• Validating and adapting the off-chain Chainlink stack to ensure compatibility with Celo
• Testing and deploying all Chainlink components to Celo mainnet, with continual maintenance and upgrades
• Automated tests to verify the integration of Celo and Chainlink using test node instances
• Documentation detailing how developers can integrate with Chainlink on Celo

Protofire is a recognized provider of development services and consultancy for blockchain technology, building decentralized protocols, smart contracts, applications, and developer tools (SDKs/APIs). Their team has contributed to the development of many top projects in the blockchain ecosystem, including: Maker, 0x, Tezos, Gnosis, Kyber Network, The Graph, Synthetix, and more. Protofire has already received several community grants for native blockchain integrations that they’ve successfully completed—or are in the process of doing so—for projects, such as xDAI, Avalanche, and Plasm. Their extensive experience and expertise in natively integrating Chainlink’s blockchain-agnostic oracle technology make them a well-suited recipient to integrate Chainlink into Celo.

Celo is a Proof-of-Stake, EVM-compatible blockchain aimed at empowering anyone in the world with a smartphone to obtain access to financial services, send money to phone numbers, and pay merchants—all on a decentralized platform that is operated by a community of users. To achieve this, Celo is a complete stack of new blockchain software that consists of core libraries and end-user applications, including a mobile wallet app that facilitates transactions. Celo supports an ecology of stablecoin currencies built directly into the base layer, starting with cUSD and cEUR—stablecoins that track the value of both the US Dollar and Euro and are overcollateralized by the Celo Reserve.

By enabling universally connected hybrid smart contracts on Celo, the community grant will enhance the many social impact initiatives underway by Celo. Some of the projects building on Celo include: Loam—blockchain-based incentives for regenerative agriculture, MOSS— tokenized carbon credits from Amazon afforestation, reforestation, and preservation projects, and Wren—a company that makes it easy to calculate and offset your carbon footprint by funding projects that plant trees, protect rainforests, or otherwise counterbalance the emissions from your life. Celo is the first carbon-neutral platform, which they contribute daily offsets towards through the network protocol.

“We’re excited to be awarded a community grant to integrate Chainlink’s oracle services and generalized functionality directly into the Celo blockchain,” stated Christian Malfesi, Director of Engineering at Protofire. “Having already natively integrated Chainlink into several prominent blockchains, our highly experienced dev shop is excited to further expand Chainlink into Celo’s smart contract platform. This will empower Celo developers to build a global financial infrastructure that is connected to key external datasets and off-chain computations from Chainlink while supported by Celo’s blockchain technology that’s specifically optimized for mobile users.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower more and more Chainlink ecosystem teams, researchers, and social impact projects that are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure to accelerate the development of universally connected smart contracts, secure oracle networks, and impactful technology. We will continue supporting the community as a key driver of Chainlink’s rapid growth, because only together can we make universally connected, hybrid 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.  We encourage talented individual developers and development teams to apply to the grant program, or if you’re a researcher and want to collaborate, contact us. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in cash and/or LINK.