The infrastructure and frameworks needed to be developed to fuel the growth of the Chainlink community and accelerate the adoption of hybrid smart contracts. New tools needed to be created, updated, and maintained, as well as the original key developer tools. Therefore, Applied Blockchain was commissioned by Chainlink to improve and maintain the Chainlink Hardhat Starter Kit, a toolkit for building Chainlinked smart contracts. Hardhat is a development environment that allows Ethereum developers to quickly implement Chainlink oracles into their smart contracts, enabling them to deploy and test them using repeatable predefined tasks easily.

Applied Blockchain improved the key developer framework by creating Chainlink-powered applications that leverage on-chain Data Feeds, verifiable randomness, or the ability to call any external API is simplified for development teams, resulting in faster deployments into production.

With the updated Hardhat framework, developers can run Solidity code locally, initiate tests, and debug smart contracts without dealing with live in-production environments. In addition, Hardhat provides developers extreme flexibility and the ability to extend the framework with additional plugins to address any project’s specific needs.