WINkLink is the first decentralized oracle network of TRON’s ecosystem. TRON is a robust blockchain ecosystem that follows the philosophy of “Decentralize the Web.” Various products like the public chain, wallet client, and decentralized applications (DApps) are involved in the TRON ecosystem, and they work together to maintain the stability of the ecosystem.  

As per the document of WINkLink, smart contracts are the essential part of blockchains. However, blockchain-powered smart contracts cannot communicate directly with the external system, thus limiting the diversity of the smart-contract-based applications. The solution for this problem is an oracle that connects smart contracts to the outer world. However, most of the oracles in the market are centralized, which causes smart contracts to risk a single point of failure.

WINkLink is a decentralized oracle network and offers external data for smart contracts. Furthermore, it provides a high level of security services to the entire process of smart contract execution along with receiving data from off-chain resources.

Smart contracts cannot receive the off-chain data themselves. WINkLink can yield data securely to off-chain systems, thus creating a solid connection to the real world and aiming to ensure that smart contracts are tamper-proof. Off-chain transactions are those transactions that occur outside the blockchain. Smart contracts are just like regular contracts; however, instead of being drafted on paper, these contracts run in the form of protocols on the blockchain.

 WIN is the TRC-20 token of WINkLink. TRC-20 is a technical standard for executing tokens used for smart contracts on the TRON blockchain. WIN token is used to pay WINkLink node operators to recover data from off-chain data feeds, off-chain computation, and data formatting into blockchain-readable formats.

Features of WINkLink

WINkLink Workflow

WINkLink aims to connect the on-chain and off-chain worlds. Currently, the WINkLink oracle is only available on the TRON network, but it plans to expand to other blockchain networks in the future. The team developed WINkLink with modularization in mind, as outlined in the whitepaper, to make future improvements easier.

On-Chain

The on-chain module of WINkLink is called the aggregator contract. The nodes and services are chosen from the front-end page for the aggregator contract, after which the final result for requesting contracts is calculated.

Off-Chain

The oracle node is the off-chain component of WINkLink. The aggregator contract requires nodes to gather off-chain data individually before calculating a single outcome. The WINkLink nodes are driven by an open-source core implementation that manages normal blockchain interactions, scheduling, and connecting to common external services.

WINkLink has proposed a contract-upgrade service for the security points. The reason behind proposing the contract-upgrade service is that many smart contract hack events show significant security risks. However, this service is not mandatory. The philosophy of decentralization allows users to decide if they want to turn contract-upgrade services on or not.

WINkLink’s whitepaper was launched on October 6, 2020.