Launching the Chainlink Market v2

It’s been over a year and a half since we first launched our metrics functionality within market.link and since then the Chainlink Network has grown astronomically, becoming the solid foundation that much of DeFi and other primitives rely on across a variety of layer 1 and layer 2 blockchain networks.

For us at LinkPool, it’s incredibly important to catalyze the growth of Chainlink by adapting our products, extending the functionality of Chainlink’s developments, and by leveraging the high adoption rates to benefit not just us but the wider ecosystem. This new iteration of the Market is a large part of that, not by just providing novel ways to observe in granular detail how the Chainlink Network is growing and performing but rather by thinking about its future.

If we think of how the industry-standard decentralised oracle network further pushes its boundaries in capability, supporting the transparency and decentralisation of its operation should be a primary goal. In order for the network and the management of its core services like price feeds, VRF, CCIP, and PoR to eventually transition to a self-service model and into the hands of the network participants, users and builders need an open, comprehensive, single-pane of glass view into its operation.

This is a primary motivation for Market Metrics, a data service that has been re-built from the ground up. The service will be open-sourced, and is designed specifically to observe and adapt to the behaviour of Chainlink products and services providing an ETL (extract, transform, and load) pipeline that is positioned to not just provide the wider ecosystem with incredible context on Chainlink metrics, but to also be another tool for network participants to build their own successful Chainlink services for the foreseeable future.

At a high level, we’ve completely re-built all of the UI sections within market.link to show incredibly high-resolution and pinpoint accurate data of how each network, feed, and node is operating. At the face level, it may seem like not much has changed, but to list the major features:

• Full resolution charts that show high volatility market events.
• A completely redesigned search console that provides context while drilling down to find the right feed, node, or data provider.
• Live events pages that stream in real-time all events across every network, feed, and node.
• Pinpoint accuracy of Chainlink reported data, with considerably higher guarantees of sustained accuracy over time, even in case of issues like unexpected hard forks.
• Full historical data for all Chainlink activity on every EVM network. We’re launching with 30 day data availability, and soon we’ll display data spanning back to the start of activity on each network.
• Self-discovery of new Chainlink nodes across every network, automatically associating nodes on feeds to the correct Node Operator team.
• Detailed profit, revenue, and profit margin charts across every network, feed, and node.
• Not just time-series data. Detailed logs that link an on-chain event to its block number, transaction hash, gas price, node, and feed.
• Complete coverage for core Chainlink Services like VRF, Keepers, and Direct Request jobs.

With all of the above, this new version of the Market provides a far richer experience that allows anyone from general observers, developers, node operators, and users to have a detailed view into how Chainlink has succeeded in securing nearly $40b within the DeFi ecosystem.

With this powerful new tool at our disposal, we’ve expanded the data presented in the Market beyond just Price Feeds. We’re now collecting and displaying detailed metrics for some of Chainlink’s most important services including VRF, Keepers, and Direct Requests. For each of these, we’re tracking activity across each network Chainlink is live on, including number of requests by network, rewards earned, gas spent, P&L, and more. 

Each dashboard allows you to inspect a particular Chainlink Service at a glance, providing unprecedented insight into how Chainlink enables developers to build the next generation of hybrid smart contracts.

Notably, both Price Feeds and nodes are now grouped, allowing you to inspect the activity of a specific node operator or the price feeds for a particular asset across multiple networks. Most Chainlink node operators run nodes on a several chains, and most Price Feeds have deployments on a number of networks. This unified view allows you to assess their performance wholistically for the first time.

For everyone to effectively use the new metrics that we’re providing, it helps to give context on how it works under the hood. Originally in the first iteration of metrics, it purely used Prometheus and returned time-series based data. 

In the new update, we’re leveraging a solution called TimescaleDB. There’s many reasons why we chose this approach, but the primary reason is the use of SQL as the query language and also its powerful scaling and data aggregation capabilities that allow for incredibly large time frames to be queried in sub-second times.

Since it’s now possible to use raw SQL to query the Metrics API, it also makes it much easier for everybody else to consume the data as far more people know a query language like SQL compared to other more esoteric languages such as PromQL or Lucene.

In the future we’ll be providing a dedicated technical deep-dive article that will explain the entire solution and how people can leverage this tooling and API to be able to consume and display Chainlink data for their own applications and use-cases.

The entire LinkPool team is delighted to share the results of our months of effort, and we all hope that you see the benefit and value of the new detailed metrics functionality within Market.link. In the future we’ll be open-sourcing this tool for others to run and contribute to as we see it being a core part of Chainlink’s self-service model, hopefully aiding its exponential self-driven growth in the years to come.

• Market
• Website
• Twitter
• Market Telegram
• Telegram
• Reddit