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 Kurtosis, a platform for the end-to-end testing of mission-critical blockchain infrastructure, has been selected as a recipient of the Chainlink Community Grant Program. Kurtosis is receiving a grant to construct an automated and extensible testing platform that validates the scalability and reliability of Chainlink oracle networks. The custom-built Kurtosis test platform will validate the security assumptions at different levels of network consumption for various types of Chainlink oracle networks across different blockchains, enabling developers to test their upper limits of scalability while still maintaining high reliability during simulated black swan events.

Kurtosis was founded by two former Palantir engineers, Kevin Today and Galen Marchetti, both of which have extensive experience battle-testing large distributed systems in heterogeneous environments. From that experience, they created Kurtosis — a continuous testing environment purpose-built to provide developers the tooling they require to build anti-fragile distributed systems that are resistant to network failures. The Kurtosis platform gives developers the tools to automate the creation of test environments, simulate outages or malicious behavior, and test their codebase against arbitrary black swan failures before deploying into production. By testing for weaknesses in early-stage development, downtime and outages can be prevented. The Kurtosis framework has already been implemented for the Avalanche blockchain.

Through the Chainlink grant, Kurtosis will work to customize its framework so it’s tailored to the specific requirements of running secure and reliable Chainlink oracle networks. The goal is to make the framework openly accessible to development teams across the Chainlink ecosystem, which they can use with minimal effort to verify their work before it’s audited and/or launched in-production. It will also serve as a toolkit for developers who want to experiment with and test various real-world scenarios and oracle design limits on the Chainlink Network. Testing platforms can help drive more innovative and resilient Chainlink solutions built in a more efficient manner, both through reducing development workloads and allowing developers to focus on their core feature work instead of the construction of test infrastructure.

Additionally, having uniform stress tests for various Chainlink oracle functions ensures integration work performed by different development teams throughout the ecosystem meets the same high standards of current native Chainlink integrations in various blockchains, such as Matic and Binance Smart Chain. This will accelerate the rate at which Chainlink is integrated into new blockchain environments, while still ensuring a consistent level of reliability is maintained across the entire Chainlink ecosystem.

Working with the Chainlink engineering and research team, Kurtosis will strive to build a platform where developers can plug their work into the Kurtosis testing framework and initiate a multitude of unit tests. These tests will verify the performance of Chainlink oracle functionalities within specific blockchain environments, including extreme failure scenarios such as network partitions in the underlying blockchain, unstable API connections, malicious behavior of participants, and more. Each test runs in an isolated private testnet to allow for adjustments of different fault tolerances and failure scenarios. As a result, Kurtosis can help identify and mitigate potential performance failures or outages early in the testing process.

Given the increasing demand from smart contract developers wanting native support of Chainlink oracles within their preferred blockchain environments, Kurtosis makes a strong recipient of Chainlink Community Grant to create standardized testing guardrails that developers can leverage to test the quality of their Chainlink oracle designs and receive immediate feedback on.

“We’re looking forward to extending the Kurtosis Platform to the Chainlink Network, so developers can continuously test Chainlink oracle networks with isolated, manipulable testnets,” said Galen Marchetti, Co-Founder & CEO of Kurtosis. “This gives developers a toolkit for testing the bounds of reliability on various oracle designs in response to numerous real-world scenarios and across different blockchains. With Kurtosis, developers can root out bugs and launch Chainlink integrations into production safely and efficiently, ultimately helping accelerate the adoption of Chainlink.”

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 hybrid 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 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.