{"document_id":"BLC-PAPER-0008","slug":"chainlink","title":"Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network","authors":"Steve Ellis, Ari Juels, Sergey Nazarov","year":2017,"date_label":"2017","publisher":"Chainlink","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Data and agents","topics":["Oracles","Off-chain data"],"source_url":"https://chain.link/whitepaper","source_label":"Chainlink white paper","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"The 2017 oracle-network paper. A single operator feed is a narrower object.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"The paper describes independent nodes that fetch a fact from outside a chain, aggregate it, and deliver a signed result, with a reputation and penalty story around the nodes.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/chainlink","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/chainlink","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/chainlink","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Chainlink study","href":"/whitepaper/chainlink"},{"rel":"Proposes","label":"Oracle","href":"/learn/concepts/oracle"},{"rel":"Used by designs such as","label":"Maker, which needs a price","href":"/whitepaper/maker-dai"}]}