Chainlink's roots go back to 2014, when Sergey Nazarov (born in Russia in 1987, his family moving to New York in 1990) and Steve Ellis started the project under the name “SmartContract.com.” Nazarov had previously founded several blockchain ventures (QED Capital, CryptaMail, Secure Asset Exchange), while Ellis had been CTO of Secure Asset Exchange.
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September 2017: the team, joined by Cornell Tech professor Ari Juels, publishes the Chainlink whitepaper, and the project takes the Chainlink name.
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Sept 19 – Oct 19, 2017: a token sale raises roughly $32 million from 2,649 contributors; LINK's initial price was roughly $0.09.
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2019: the network officially launches (mainnet).
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2018: integrates Town Crier, a trusted-execution-environment (TEE) based oracle; 2020: integrates DECO, a zero-knowledge-based protocol (both also Juels' work).
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April 2021: the “Chainlink 2.0” whitepaper is published, outlining a vision for “hybrid smart contracts.”
The core of the “oracle problem”: smart contracts on their own cannot access off-chain data — Chainlink*'*s decentralized oracle network bridges this gap, delivering reliable, multi-source data to contracts.