Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Now Advising Chainlink

key takeaways

Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, and now runs a venture firm, Schmidt Futures
In a statement announcing the appointment, Schmidt praised Chainlink for “unlocking the potential of smart contract platforms and revolutionizing business and society”

Oracle infrastructure provider Chainlink Labs has signed Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, as a strategic advisor.

The Chainlink Network secures oracle data feeds that are responsible for triggering and securing more than $80 billion worth of value locked, across several blockchains.

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, said in a statement, “Eric’s experience and insights around building global software platforms for next-generation innovation will be invaluable as we help developers and institutions usher in a new age of economic fairness and transparency.”

Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, and was at the helm for the company’s 2004 IPO at a valuation of $24 billion. Today the company’s ubiquitous Web2 apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube helped generate a record $181 billion in revenue during 2020.

While phasing out his involvement at Google Schmidt co-founded Schmidt Futures in 2017, which bills itself as a venture facility for public benefit.

“The launch of blockchains and smart contracts has demonstrated tremendous potential for the building of new business models, but it has become clear that one of blockchain’s greatest advantages — a lack of connection to the world outside itself — is also its biggest challenge,” said Schmidt.

A blockchain oracle is critical to the functioning of many smart contracts, particularly when they need to access off-chain data and systems. Chainlink aggregates such real world data and makes it available to the logic contained in blockchain-based smart contracts.

For example, Chainlink’s collaboration with Google Cloud’s Public Datasets Program allows weather data to be directly available to emerging Web3 capital markets, according to a blog post published by Google Cloud earlier this year. Data from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of weather data, can power smart contract crop insurance, and the two companies have built a proof of concept for an Ethereum testnet.

Chainlink has called itself blockchain agnostic, and announced the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), to provide a universal, open standard for developers program actions across multi-blockchain ecosystem.

Schmidt’s appointment is unrelated to his prior work at Google, a Chainlink Labs representative told Blockworks.

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