Research corpus Data and agentsBLC-PAPER-0008

Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network

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.

Official external source only
Design paper
Official source

Compare

Record

Authors: Steve Ellis, Ari Juels, Sergey Nazarov
Date: 2017
Publisher: Chainlink
Version: The 2017 oracle-network paper. A single operator feed is a narrower object.
Document ID: BLC-PAPER-0008
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence recorded. Rights status under review.

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.

Direct answer

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.

The chain can check the signatures. It cannot check the world. That sentence is the whole point of keeping the paper.

Why it is in the corpus

Any contract that pays on a price, a delivery, or a result has to name who typed the fact.
The paper's answer is a committee, an aggregation, and a deposit. A logo that says oracle is not that answer.

Where to read

Official source — Chainlink white paper
Blockchain Lab study, the canonical readingOriginal commentary. Not a transcription of the paper.

Metadata and commentary only.

Full text

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.

Claims and assumptions

Blockchain Lab's reading of what the document is doing. Not a quotation and not the source text.

A requester specifies a query.
Selected oracles fetch, and an aggregating contract posts a combined answer.
Deposits and reputation are how the paper tries to make a lie expensive.

Assumptions

Enough independent operators, and a data source that is not already captured.
The aggregation the contract actually runs is the one the reader thinks it is.

What changed

Later Chainlink services and a one-operator feed are not automatically this paper. The study keeps the 2017 design in view.

Relationships

Canonical readingChainlink study
ProposesOracle
Used by designs such asMaker, which needs a price

Construct with this

A pattern link for people designing a system. It is not a claim that this paper is a product specification, and it is not permission to copy anyone’s code.

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Ellis, S., Juels, A., & Nazarov, S. (2017). Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network. Chainlink. https://chain.link/whitepaper

BibTeX

@techreport{chainlink2017,
  title = {Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network},
  author = {Steve Ellis, Ari Juels, Sergey Nazarov},
  year = {2017},
  institution = {Chainlink},
  url = {https://chain.link/whitepaper},
  note = {Rights status: Official external source only. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/chainlink}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network
AU  - Steve Ellis
AU  - Ari Juels
AU  - Sergey Nazarov
PY  - 2017
PB  - Chainlink
UR  - https://chain.link/whitepaper
N1  - Rights status: Official external source only
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-PAPER-0008",
    "title": "Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Steve Ellis"
      },
      {
        "literal": "Ari Juels"
      },
      {
        "literal": "Sergey Nazarov"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2017
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Chainlink",
    "URL": "https://chain.link/whitepaper",
    "note": "Rights status: Official external source only. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

JSON BibTeX file RIS file CSL-JSON

Rights record

Source status: Official source
Use status: Metadata and commentary only.
Rights: Official external source only
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections