Chainlink's Chief Engineer Steve Ellis on Building a Decentralized Oracle Network

Steve Ellis is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Chainlink Labs, the company behind the Chainlink decentralized oracle network. He built the engineering foundation that lets smart contracts pull real-world data onto the blockchain.

Ellis earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from New York University in 2010 and worked as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs for three years before co-founding Secure Asset Exchange, a decentralized asset marketplace. He served as CTO until January 2016.

Ellis and Sergey Nazarov started Chainlink under the name SmartContract.com in 2014, which was later rebranded to Chainlink in 2017. The company published its whitepaper in September 2017, outlining a system where independent node operators supply external data to smart contracts without relying on a single source.

Chainlink went live on the Ethereum mainnet in 2019, starting with a single price feed. Ellis has also pushed Chainlink's technology into areas outside DeFi, including enterprise data verification and cross-chain communication through the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol.