/biz/ - Business & Finance

Look at ETH.
What makes it worth the $300 it is today?
Smart contracts
They are revolutionary. Don't know why? Google it. You will find all sorts of uses for them, from Finance, Insurance companies, Airlines, you name it. There is a problem however, which is probably slowing down ETH's growth. Right now, smart contracts on the Ethereum network are limited; it's confined within the blockchain and with data on the blockchain.
Chainlink changes that.
All of those potential uses for Smart Contracts - that's all now a very legitimate possibility now. In the simplest terms, Chainlink allows for external data to inform smart contracts. When you consider the fact that it's decentralised, it gets a whole lot better.
People that keep saying things like "why would banks use chainlink when they can just make their own version" clearly don't understand the fundamentals of this project. Chainlink's goal is not to "be used" like (e.g.) Ripple hopes to achieve.
Chainlink is merely the bridge that enables data which is outside of the Ethereum 'universe', to communicate with it, and thus execute various actions. Thus, it's not unlikely that adopters will use their own private blockchain (biggest reason would be to avoid the market fluctuations in it's value). But - what will they use to get their data, onto the blockchain - whether it be their own token, eth, etc... Chainlink.

1. Eth and smartcontracts. We all know smartcontracts are revolutoinary, but their use cases are limited. Smartcontracts are awesome, but they are confined within the blockchain and data on the blockchain. In otherwords, right now smartcontracts are "you send 1 eth and I'll send back 1000 McTokens", and this contract is verifiable/trustless/amazing but its stuck within the universe of Ethereum and the data Ethereum understands