Chainlink rolls out OCR system upgrade, reducing gas costs tenfold

Chainlink has launched a major upgrade for its oracle network, dubbed Off-Chain Reporting, or OCR. The upgrade was announced on Wednesday, though the implementation has been live for some time already.

OCR changes how data across multiple sources is joined together by the oracle network. Previously, the process of aggregating different readings of the same desired input — for example, a token’s price — was done on-chain. Chainlink nodes would submit their individual readings of the data, which would be verified by a smart contract on Ethereum and other blockchains. This approach, while guaranteeing the reliability of the data, was inefficient in terms of gas costs, as each node would need to spend resources to publish the data.