/biz/ - Business & Finance

Anyone else unironically worried about CCIP? It's like nobody realizes what a huge fucking deal this is.

Chris Blec, as much as I love making fun of him, isn't entirely in the wrong. He, without fully understanding it, pointed out one thing: Chainlink really underpins most of the defi economy. It is used on all the chains, by thousands of dapps at this point. How the market or the VCs haven't realized that this the biggest monopoly in all of crypto, man, I don't get it, it baffles me, but it's not important. We know CL Labs prefers the low-key and stealth approach, so they can capture as much customers and grow value secured as discreetly as possible; it's due to the lack of hype from VCs and retail, due to it being "boring" backend/infra that no viable competitors have spun up. I mean it's the textbook example of a sleeping giant.

Now so far, their track record has been nothing but stellar, with just a couple of tiny fuck-ups since mainnet. With all the exploits discovered left and right in defi, it's really mind blowing tbqh. But with cross-chain bridges and staking, the network will evolve in a completely new territory. There will be major attack attempts. There will be smearing campaigns. It will all escalate and accelerate. And because Chainlink is already so fucking big, a single successful hit, could result in absolutely disastrous consequences for both Chainlink itself and the entire sector. You've seen Wormhole. All the biggest exploits so far have been bridges-related, and before that they were oracles/flash loans-related. Chainlink successfully sidestepped the later but the former is orders of magnitude more dangerous and complex to get 100% right, which is why they've been delaying it forever. You've seen Luna. You've seen how a project successfully entrenching itself deep into other core projects could result in a major system risk.