(Bloomberg) — Chainlink Labs has hired Dahlia Malkhi, former chief technology officer at Diem Association — a stablecoin project backed by Meta Platforms Inc. that was sold earlier this year — as its chief research officer amid a push to increase web3 adoption.
Malkhi will work on the technologies behind the infrastructure needed to advance web3, touted by backers as the blockchain future of the internet. She’ll also be tasked with helping the firm become more scalable as it grows, Sergey Nazarov, CEO of Chainlink Labs told Bloomberg News. Nazarov is also the co-founder of Chainlink, the firm’s underlying protocol.
Chainlink Labs, which provides data to smart contracts, had over 300 employees by the end of 2021, up from 70 people a year earlier, Nazarov said. It will add at least 400 more employees globally this year.
The firm was quick to tap Diem’s tech talent after it was acquired by Silvergate Capital Corp. in January. It brought Diem’s co-creator Christian Catalini onboard as its technical adviser that month as well as Stanford University cryptographer Dan Boneh. And it added former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to its team as a strategic advisor in December.
Chainlink Labs also recently hired Mike Derezin as its chief operating officer. Derezin, who joined late last year after more than a decade at LinkedIn Corp., is responsible for the operational side of the firm as it grows.
The Chainlink network topped $75 billion in total value secured in November as hundreds of decentralized financial applications running on multiple blockchains were integrated into its oracles. Oracles connect blockchains to external systems, which then allow smart contracts to be executed based on real-world events. For example, the oracles feed data — such as weather results — from external sources to blockchains such as Ethereum and the Binance Smart Chain. That information would then allow a smart contract to self-execute based on a predetermined agreement.
In August, Switzerland’s largest telecommunications provider Swisscom announced it is launching a Chainlink oracle node to provide data for decentralized financial applications.
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