There’s a lot of confusion about what @chainlink is and what it represents. Here’s a clear breakdown:

1/ Chainlink represents an ecosystem of numerous decentralized oracle networks. This implies that it’s not just an oracle and it’s not even a network of oracles. It’s a lot bigger than that.

2/ Each oracle is simply a service that responds to whatever real-life event based on a certain trigger or a direct request: booking confirmation, car purchase, FX rate change, rental signature.

Essentially, it’s @IFTTT for the blockchain world.

3/ See, smart contracts can’t communicate to Web APIs, payments systems, cloud providers, etc.

APIs break, databases get deleted, infra for other blockchains become unstable.

That’s why nodes will never include this unpredictable behavior in their validation process.

4/ You could create your own oracle or use a centralized one. But that kind of breaks the whole point of decentralization and you waste a lot of resources in the process.

5/ Next. Each event (e.g. weather data change) on a Chainlink network is processed by multiple oracles within the same type of an oracle network:
- Decentralized Price Feeds
- A Verifiable Random Function (VRF)
- External Adapters
- Other

6/ Price Feeds are pre-built and return a price for a requested asset pair (e.g. ETH/USD).

VRF helps generate random numbers on-chain in a secure and provably-fair way.

External Adapters are useful for custom data manipulation, such as computation, authentication, etc.

7/ These different types of oracle networks form an entire ecosystem or a set of decentralized oracle networks.

The best part is that they run in parallel without interfering with each other.

Let’s just say they are independent and awesome.