Chainlink Functions goes live on Base L2, enabling on-demand API access

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Chainlink Functions, a product of decentralized oracle network Chainlink, has officially launched on Base, the layer-2 blockchain incubated by Coinbase and secured through Ethereum’s architecture.

The integration provides smart contract developers on Base with access to trust-minimized compute infrastructure, enabling them to fetch data from APIs and perform custom computations from a serverless environment.

Chainlink Functions is a serverless, self-serve developer platform that allows developers to connect their smart contracts to any API and trust-minimized computations. It serves as a decentralized compute runtime, useful for testing, simulating, and running custom off-chain logic for Web3 applications. In many aspects, Chainlink Functions acts as a trust-minimized, blockchain-connected version of existing serverless solutions like AWS Lambda and GCP CloudFunctions.

Trust-minimized compute infrastructure refers to a system that reduces the need to trust external actors involved in computations by using cryptographic techniques to validate information passed between different components.

Such a concept is often applied in the context of blockchain and smart contract technologies, where trust-minimized compute infrastructure enables secure and reliable off-chain computation without relying on a single source of truth or a centralized entity.

With Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network (DON), trust-minimized compute infrastructure is achieved through the use of cryptographic primitives, such as zero-knowledge proofs, to validate information passed between blockchains.

“Base is continuing to show itself as a fast performing and sophisticated L2 that is empowering developers to build at scale in the blockchain ecosystem,” shares Thodoris Karakostas, Head of Blockchain Partnerships at Chainlink Labs.

Karakostas claims that access to Functions would help developers working on Base to increase their maneuverability.

Base, built as an Ethereum L2, offers the security, stability, and scalability necessary to power decentralized applications (dapps). Projects can deploy any EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) codebase and onboard users and assets from Ethereum L1, Coinbase, as well as other interoperable chains. Base was designed to serve as the on-chain home for Coinbase products, users, and assets, as well as an open ecosystem where anyone can build and reduce costs for users.

Chainlink Functions eliminates the need for developers to manage their own Chainlink node and provides decentralized off-chain computation and consensus, ensuring that a minority of the network cannot manipulate the response sent back to the smart contract.

The platform also supports the inclusion of secret values in requests, which are encrypted using threshold encryption and can only be decrypted through a multi-party decryption process, ensuring that every node can only decrypt the secrets with participation from other DON nodes.

Note: This article was produced with the assistance of AI, specifically Claude 3 Opus for text and OpenAI’s GPT-4 for images. The editor has extensively revised the content to adhere to journalism standards for objectivity and neutrality.

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