HENI is the first NFT project to utilize Chainlink oracles. They will use oracles to price Damien Hirst’s NFTs across The Currency collection. HENI is utilizing Chainlink’s industry-leading oracles to give up-to-date pricing values for the collection to decentralized finance (DeFi). The pricing and oracle operations will happen on Ethereum.
HENI is utilizing Chainlink oracles to deliver pricing data into blockchains, allowing smart contracts to retrieve the current value of The Currency NFTs at any given time. Smart contract developers can then leverage this pricing data in a variety of ways, including creating prediction markets based on the floor price, launching lending markets using The Currency NFTs as collateral, and facilitating payments based on real-time exchange rates.
Damien Hirst’s Currency is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that correspond to 10,000 unique physical artworks. In July 2021, the collection was unveiled. Hundreds of identical yet distinct, colorful spots are included in each hand-painted artwork, with inventive names derived by applying machine learning to some of the artist’s favorite song lyrics. Although the collection was created on Palm, an EVM-compatible sidechain, many of the NFTs were transferred to Ethereum via the bridge.
Collectors are given the option of keeping the NFT or exchanging it for the physical artwork; if they choose the NFT, the artwork is destroyed, and vice versa. So far, 492 NFTs have been destroyed in return for a tangible painting.
HENI team realized early on in the development of The Currency that if NFTs are to be used as a medium of exchange, there must be access to high-quality price data across the whole NFT collection. The HENI Data Science team is accomplishing this by utilizing Chainlink oracles to bring up-to-date NFT pricing to blockchains.
The oracle problem refers to the fact that blockchains are fundamentally separated from external data and systems. As a result, HENI needed a middleware solution known as an “oracle” to connect The Currency Price Index data on-chain so that blockchain apps could use it to enable operations like payments and lending. Following an evaluation of different oracle systems, they chose Chainlink since it is the industry’s most well-known and commonly used decentralized oracle network. The team said in the announcement:
“After reviewing various oracle solutions, we decided to use Chainlink because it is the most time-tested and widely adopted decentralized oracle network in the industry. Some of the other unique benefits of providing our data through Chainlink oracle infrastructure include: Credential Management — Chainlink nodes can securely manage API keys and account logins, enabling Chainlink nodes to bring any type of external data on-chain….”
