One of the main goals of the Chainlink Community Grant Program is to support our global developer community by making it easy to learn about, build, and impact the world with hybrid smart contracts and Chainlink oracles. The Chainlink Community Grant Program accelerates this initiative by financially supporting the creation of developer tooling needed to seamlessly create, test, and launch hybrid smart contracts into production, as well as funding the continued maintenance and updating of these developer repositories to ensure they remain functional and secure. 

To achieve this goal, we actively support initiatives that help smart contract developers thoroughly secure their Chainlinked smart contract applications before deploying them to mainnet. A large part of this means financially supporting E2E infrastructure needed to properly test smart contracts in environments that mirror mainnet conditions as closely as possible, allowing developers to go into production with confidence after testing their Chainlink integrations.

To further our support for this testing infrastructure, we are excited to announce that Chaos Labs, a cloud testing environment for smart contract applications, has been awarded a Chainlink Community Grant for the integration of Chainlink oracles within its isolated sandbox testing environment. With DeFi protocols now securing tens of billions in value on mainnet, implementing support for Chainlink oracles within such testing environments is crucial to help ensure the long-term sustainability and security of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.

Chaos Labs enables teams to create high-fidelity agent- and scenario-based simulations on mainnet forks, offering a real-world testing environment. Currently live for protocols on the Ethereum network and later expanding to additional blockchains such as Terra and Polygon, this grant will enable developers to configure mock Chainlink oracles quickly and accurately within an isolated sandbox environment, allowing teams to test oracles under various conditions as part of their end-to-end test flows.

By lowering infrastructure overhead and reducing the complexity of testing Chainlink-powered applications, developers can rapidly speed up development and reduce their go-to-market time, helping them stay competitive without compromising on the security of their protocol. Through the creation of an API specification allowing for the mock usage of Chainlink oracles, as well as a user interface for configuration and usage flow, the smart contract ecosystem as a whole can boost user trust.

“We are proud to have received a Chainlink Community Grant for the integration of Chainlink oracles into the Chaos Labs cloud testing environment, enabling developers to thoroughly test their application and get the confidence they need before finally deploying into production,” stated Chaos Labs founder Omer Goldberg. “Expanding the feature set of testing environments available to smart contract developers helps the blockchain ecosystem become better protected.”

Through the Chainlink Community Grants program, we look forward to continuing to empower Chainlink ecosystem teams, researchers, and social impact projects that are both researching and building key tools and infrastructure that accelerate the development of hybrid smart contracts, secure oracle networks, and impactful technology that improves the world. 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. If you would like to participate in the Chainlink Grant Program, please apply here. Chainlink Community Grants are provided in cash and/or LINK.