During the time I was working in audit I’ve learned to appreciate the beauty of internally consistent ledger systems with immutable revision history — blockchains. They enable a single source of verifiable truth, something that is inherently difficult to look up in the dominant social institutions and corporations of today. The information required to discover the truth is scattered between internal databases, documents, spreadsheets, email and physically as paper. Sometimes key information resides inside of human minds of past and present employees. And to connect it all together, one needs to navigate the entangled threads of regulations, internal policies and bureaucracy.
Smart contract based blockchains like Polkadot and Ethereum are building a fundamental technology that will enable modernization of many existing institutions. However, there is a problem with the base layer chains that prevents them from doing so. In order to have a fast and reliable consensus algorithm, all of the state has to be readily available and all state transitions need to be deterministic. This bounds the scope of information that smart contract platforms have to itself, making them mostly useless for real world applications.
In order for blockchains to become useful as consistent and verifiable sources of truth for real applications such as insurance, prediction markets, money markets with real world collateral, derivatives markets, title registries and more, they need access to high quality, real world data.
Paralink aims to solve this problem by building a trusted real world data ingress for modern cross-chain applications. The core design principle in Paralink are the self organizing relayer quorums that source, aggregate and verify real-world information. The rest is infrastructural scaffolding to make it all work with various data sources (API’s, databases, etc) and public blockchains (Polkadot, Ethereum, etc). You can read more about it in our whitepaper.