The shares of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway dropped by more than 99% during the early trading hours on Monday. The New York Stock Exchange [NYSE] attributed the dramatic dip to a technical glitch. Resultantly, brakes were applied on trading. The issue was, however, soon resolved, and by late Monday normal trading resumed.
The NYSE later went on to reveal that the issue stemmed from the market's prime electronic stock price publisher, the Consolidated Tape Association [CTA]. The issue is said to have been related to a software update that affected price "bands," i.e. the electronic guardrails that put a cap on volatility. The publisher resolved the issue by reverting operations to a data center where the ex-software was still in use.
On-chain solutions could potentially resolve problems like this without much of a hassle. In fact, this is where oracle projects like Chainlink come into the picture and help provide accurate and timely data. Multiple sources, i.e. decentralized nodes, are used to collect data, after which consensus mechanisms are used to validate and verify it, adding more authenticity.
Irregularities and oddities like the aforementioned price dump would be resolved by automated responses, and this, ultimately, would hardly leave room for price manipulation. Via a recent post on X, the Chainlink team noted,
“Today’s stock market issues with BRK.A and other assets highlight the need for an on-chain financial system—one backed by decentralized infrastructure that eliminates single points of failure and reduces systemic risk across the global economy.”
On the heels of the latest development, the worldwide search trends w.r.t. 'on-chain' on Google went on to claim a new all-time high. Alongside, related queries like blockchain also started seeing renewed traction.
Weighing on the Berkshire situation, Zach Rynes, aka ChainLinkGod noted that a “robust alternative for reliable asset trading and price feed reporting” was the need of the hour. Further elaborating, he said,
“Decentralized data sourcing and aggregation allows for the elimination of single points of failure. DeFi has known this for years. Just another proof point of the benefits in bringing capital markets onchain.”
Chainlink Adoption
Chainlink’s adoption has been refining with time. Just over the past week, for instance, there were 12 integrations of its services spanning across automation, CCIP, data feeds, VRF, and price feeds. Its services were integrated on six chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Celo, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, and Aptos.
From the price perspective, LINK continues to remain stranded around the $17 threshold. Over the past day it has shed almost 3% of its value, but according to on-chain data, the asset is “undervalued” at the moment.
