Chainlink Weekly Roundup: Staking, Hackathon, BBA, Catheon, WigoSwap

Chainlink Staking Pool Fills Quickly

Crypto’s dominant smart contract oracle network always has plenty of news to report, but this week Chainlink was even busier than usual, successfully launching its highly anticipated staking function and forging partnerships with a variety of Web3 projects.

In this week’s roundup:

• $LINK staking pool fills within hours.
• Chainlink announces Fall 2022 Hackathon winners.
• Borderless Blockchain Alliance and Catheon Gaming establish channel partnerships with Chainlink.
• WigoSwap integrates multiple oracle services.

$LINK Staking Pool Launches

Within three hours after the $LINK staking pool was opened to the general public, the community pool was filled to the maximum amount of 22.5 million $LINK (value of about $155 million).

The listed reward rate for $LINK stakers is 4.75%. Chainlink Staking is intertwined with the platform’s other key Economics 2.0 programs, such as Chainlink BUILD and Chainlink SCALE.

Fall 2022 Hackathon Winners

Chainlink announced the winners of the Fall 2022 Hackathon, which drew more than 10,000 signups and 380 project submissions.

More than $300,000 in prize money was given to projects in eight categories. The grand prize of $25,000 went to Shiro Storage, a platform for Decentralized Applications (dApps) to store files of any kind, according to a Chainlink Blog post.

Chainlink Channel Partnerships

Chainlink forged two new channel partnerships this week, with Borderless Blockchain Alliance (BBA) and Catheon Gaming.

BBA is a blockchain development community aimed at increasing the adoption of Web3 by providing tools and resources to students, creators, and companies. The partnership with Chainlink will especially benefit the group’s Web3Gen students community.

“We believe this partnership to be mutually beneficial and propelling the growth and development of the entire blockchain ecosystem,” BBA CEO Lamar Eitow said in a Medium post. “As a result of this collaboration, startups and enterprises in our ecosystem will have better access to the Chainlink services they need to build more advanced applications that drive real-world adoption of Web3 while upholding the security and decentralization guarantees of the blockchain space.”

Meanwhile, Web3 gaming ecosystem and accelerator platform Catheon Gaming also entered into a channel partnership with Chainlink.

A key focus of the partnership will be on promoting Catheon Gaming’s eight-week GameFi accelerator program, which is set to begin in early 2023.

“We’re pleased to enter into a channel partnership with Chainlink Labs to help accelerate the adoption of GameFi projects,” Catheon Gaming Co-CEO William Wu said in a Medium post. “As a result of this collaboration, gaming projects in our ecosystem will be able to build more reliable and performant applications and gain user adoption faster by benefitting from technical and marketing support of Chainlink Labs.”

WigoSwap on Fantom

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platform WigoSwap has integrated several Chainlink services, including Chainlink Automation, Chainlink Price Feeds and Chainlink Verifiable Random Function (VRF).

WigoSwap offers a suite of DeFi functions on the Fantom blockchain. Automation and Price Feeds will be used for the protocol’s Prediction mini-game and VRF for its upcoming Lottery game.

“We are pleased to integrate multiple Chainlink services to bring new functionality to our platform and enhance the user experience. Chainlink Automation is the most battle-tested automation service in DeFi, and it will undoubtedly increase the reliability of our on-chain prediction minigame,” WigoSwap Founder Aaron said.

Last four weekly Chainlink Roundups:

• Dec. 4: Staking, Nuon, LayerZero and DVerse
• Nov. 25: Huobi, StablR, and Bitcoin.com
• Nov. 19: ChainML, LandVault
• Nov. 11: Wizard Financial, Shamba, Cask Protocol

What s Chainlink:

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Where to find Chainlink:‍

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