Chainlink has made its second acquisition with Cornell University’s privacy-preserving oracle solution DECO for an unrevealed amount. 

Deco Co-Founder Ari Juels will be joining Chainlink as a Chief Scientist. Since 2014, he has been teaching at Cornell University, one of the premier blockchain hubs in the world. He took leave to focus on Chainlink’s work.

The term “proof-of-work”, was coined by Jeuls and Markus Jakobsson, his research partner. DECO also claims to leverage how HTTPS/TLS data is transmitted for more secure web practices. 

As per DECO’S website reads, “DECO is also useful for users who want to monetize their own data (and therefore prove that they are indeed providing correct data) without giving away anything but the data that they are selling.”

As per Chainlink’s co-founder Sergey Nazarov, the integration of DECO will potentially create new use cases apart from an increase in the security of the project’s infrastructure.

Nazarov said,

“DECO-enabled Chainlink oracles will have big implications for smart contracts across the enterprise, consumer, and even DeFi applications. Basically, any smart contract that was previously limited by private data will soon be able to function on a public blockchain like Ethereum without revealing any confidential information to the blockchain.”

Nazarov mentioned DECO can be used as a basement for some crypto wish list items, such as decentralized identification or permissionless credit. For example, he said by pulling data from a DMV while hiding the individual’s birth date DECO can prove a person is over 18.

Nazarov said that DECO will one day allow a smart contract to check off-chain credit data such as banking records without overreaching into personal data. He also said that in the DeFi space, DECO can create endless possibilities.