SmartContract
SmartContract.com was the original name of the company that developed the Chainlink oracle network. Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis founded the company in 2014 to connect public blockchains with data and systems outside them. The organization later operated under the name Chainlink Labs.[1]
The company should not be confused with the generic concept of a smart contract, which is program code and state executed by a blockchain network. SmartContract.com was a business and development organization; Chainlink is the network and middleware project that emerged from its work.
Development of the oracle project
Smart contracts execute deterministically from information available to their blockchain. They cannot, by default, obtain arbitrary data from websites, payment systems or other off-chain services. SmartContract.com focused on this connectivity problem and developed software that allowed an on-chain contract to request information from an external data source.[2]
In July 2016, the company announced a hosted product called Smart Oracles. According to the company's release, it supported Bitcoin- and Ethereum-related workflows and offered public data feeds for the U.S. federal funds rate, BTC/USD and ETH/USD.[3] The release documents the predecessor product's scope, but as a company-authored source it does not independently establish the promotional performance claims it contained.
In September 2017, Steve Ellis, Ari Juels and Sergey Nazarov published ChainLink: A Decentralized Oracle Network. The paper proposed replacing a single trusted oracle with networks of independent node operators. It described on-chain contracts for oracle selection, reporting and aggregation, plus off-chain node software for retrieving and submitting data.[4]
The associated token sale sold 350 million of the one billion LINK created for approximately US$32 million. A further 350 million was reserved for node operators and ecosystem incentives, and 300 million was allocated to the company.[5] The sale belongs to the history of the company and network; it is not a current product description.
The network launched on Ethereum in May 2019 with an ETH/USD price feed. By then, Chainlink had become the name of the network and Chainlink Labs the name commonly used for the development company.[1] The earlier SmartContract.com material remains relevant to the project's history, but its ICO timetable and descriptions of planned functionality no longer describe the operating network.
Relationship to smart contracts
An oracle report is an input to a smart contract, not an automatic guarantee of truth. The consuming contract must identify the expected oracle contract and decide how to handle missing, delayed or disputed data. Distributing a report among multiple nodes can reduce reliance on one operator, while the quality and independence of the underlying data sources remain separate questions.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Grayscale Chainlink Trust, Form 10-K, 2026, pp. 4–5
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Ethereum.org, “Oracles”, accessed 13 September 2026
- ↑ SmartContract.com, “SmartContract.com Launches Smart Oracles”, company press release, 28 July 2016
- ↑ Steve Ellis, Ari Juels and Sergey Nazarov, ChainLink: A Decentralized Oracle Network, 4 September 2017
- ↑ Grayscale Chainlink Trust, registration statement, 5 September 2025, p. 89