An analysis of Chainlink node operator earnings

With an ever-increasing universe of ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain — more than 300,000 as of the end of September 2020 — in addition to the explosive growth in popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, oracles have become a foundational layer of the Ethereum blockchain infrastructure. This piece examines the earnings of the node operators that underpin Chainlink, the most popular and the widely-used oracle by Ethereum developers.

Oracles perform one of the most basic and yet crucial functions in the Ethereum ecosystem. They aggregate price data, most often from the APIs of centralized cryptocurrency exchanges and third party data providers, and feed that information to smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain.