Last Updated on 3 mins by Jacob O’Shea

Chainlink, the prominent blockchain data oracle provider, has recently unveiled an innovative product known as “Data Streams,” aimed at minimizing network latency. This development comes alongside the announcement of expanded decentralized computing capabilities. The company disclosed that Data Streams has entered early access on the layer 2 platform, Arbitrum, in a press release issued on Monday.

The primary objective of Chainlink Data Streams is to merge low-latency market data with automated execution, thereby ushering in a new era of exceptionally fast and user-friendly derivatives products. Low-latency market data pertains to financial data that is delivered promptly without any significant delays. To achieve this, the product utilizes a “pull-based” data oracle solution, where high-frequency market data is consistently made available off-chain. In this approach, Oracle reports are generated per block, allowing users to retrieve them off-chain and subsequently validate them with their on-chain transactions. This is in contrast to the traditional “push-based” solution where oracles proactively feed data to smart contracts at specific time intervals.

By adopting a pull-based system, Chainlink effectively reduces latency, which is the time it takes for data packets to travel from one point to another. Latency is a common issue in distributed networks, as messages need to propagate to nodes, often causing delays in the finalization and synchronization of transactions. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov emphasized, “Data Streams not only empowers DeFi (decentralized finance) protocols to achieve execution speeds and user experiences comparable to centralized exchanges but does so without compromising the fundamental Web3 values of fairness, transparency, and decentralization.”

Furthermore, Chainlink also made significant strides in decentralized computing on the same day, introducing Functions Beta and Automation 2.0 on the main network. Chainlink Functions enables developers to seamlessly connect decentralized applications with any Application Programming Interface (API), serving as an intermediary layer for processing data transfers across systems. Simultaneously, Chainlink Functions automates high-value tasks at a fraction of the cost, potentially saving up to 90% in gas costs, as highlighted in the company’s press release.

In a statement conveyed by a spokesperson, Kemal El Moujahid, the Chief Product Officer at Chainlink Labs (the primary developer contributing to Chainlink), expressed, “With all these new updates, we are establishing a standard for how developers can connect heterogeneous Web3 components with existing systems, effortlessly move data and value across various blockchain ecosystems, and create novel, verifiable applications.”