On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, Chainlink Labs, the leading provider of secure oracle solutions for mainstream blockchain adoption, announced that the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, had joined the team of tech progressives at the company as a strategic advisor.
Schmidt has established himself as a believer in decentralised finance and cryptocurrency. He is recorded to have described Bitcoin as “a remarkable cryptographic achievement.” Now acting as an advisor for Chainlink Labs, Schmidt, with an estimated net worth of $23.6 billion, will be the wealthiest individual to do so.
Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO until 2011 and later served as executive chair at the tech giant and Alphabet, its parent company, joins Chainlink Labs to further bridge the gap between blockchain decentralisation and the outside world.
Chainlink Labs is an organisation that plans to build upon the efficiency of smart contracts and connect the world with decentralisation.
Schmidt will now work to further achieve the goals of Chainlink Labs to accelerate smart contract innovation. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that work automatically to guide the terms of agreement of a transaction and are made to run on a blockchain.
Chainlink Labs further stated that their decision to bring on Schmidt was wrapped around the need to guide the scaling strategy in its use of oracle networks to trigger smart contracts. An oracle is an electronic entity that connects the blockchain to external systems, allowing smart contracts to execute operations based on data from the real world.
Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink Co-founder, refers to Schmidt’s experience in “building global software platforms for next-generation innovation” as one of the major factors that influenced their decision to have him as a strategic advisor.
The challenge with the blockchain and smart contracts as of now is their inability to connect with real-world data and services. Chainlink Labs has already positioned itself to address this challenge by using oracle networks that extract and aggregate data from the real world to trigger smart contracts built on blockchains.
Schmidt plans to, through his new role, continue Chainlink’s efforts.
“The launch of blockchains and smart contracts has demonstrated tremendous potential for the building of new business models, but it has become clear that one of blockchain’s greatest advantages- a lack of connection to the world outside itself- is also its biggest challenge,” he said.
