Who created Chainlink?

In 2017, Cornell University students and lecturer Sergey Nazarov, Steve Ellis and Dr Ari Juels came up with the idea of Chainlink as a way to connect smart contracts on the blockchain with data from the outside world.

Sergey Nazarov is a serial entrepreneur from Russia who also founded SmartContract, a way for users to build trustless, programmable agreements, as well as CryptaMail and Secure Asset Exchange. Steve Ellis is his fellow co-founder and CTO at SmartContract.com, while Dr Ari Juels is a professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

Chainlink was launched in 2017, raising funds for operations by selling its own native crypto token – LINK, which is also used to incentivise activity within its network of data providers. 350 million of the one billion possible LINK coins were offered, raising $32m. This valued the coin at $10.94 per LINK.

Since its launch, it has been updated in 2020 by Dr Juels to enhance security. In April 2021 a whitepaper called Chainlink 2.0 was published, detailing how the system can evolve and grow in the future.