Deutsche Telekom subsidiary to operate Chainlink node

Telecom companies, powerful gatekeepers of vast amounts of data, are coming for the decentralized economy. 

Chainlink announced today the addition of T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, a subsidiary of T-Mobile owners Deutsche Telekom, as a Chainlink node operator. Chainlink has been one of the standout protocols in the recent DeFi boom, and the new partnership further solidifies the commanding position of Chainlink as the dominant oracle provider for on-chain data needs.

T-Systems MMS facilitates digital transformation among large- and medium-sized corporations. The company has more than 2,100 employees and is focused on developing new digital business models for customer experience improvements, industrial Internet of Things applications, and more. T-Systems MMS’ parent company, Deutsche Telekom, is a major German telecom corporation and the largest telecom provider in Europe by revenue with more than 200,000 employees.

"Our globalised and digitalised economy requires the cooperation of multiple actors,” T-System MMS Head of Blockchain Solutions Center Dr. Andreas Dittrich said. “At the same time, the requirements for verifiability, availability and authenticity of digital assets are increasing. Any meaningful blockchain application scenario would thus require interaction with the real world.”

According to Dittrich, his firm’s decision to become a Chainlink node operator makes this possible. “Chainlink is the first public blockchain network to which we are currently providing infrastructure and staking services in the future,” he said. “This brings us a lot closer to our vision of establishing public blockchains as the basis for numerous use cases."

Chainlink has had a great year so far, scoring integrations with multiple high profile protocols and services  including crypto loan service Nexo, decentralized VPN service Orchid, protocol level Ethereum competitor Tezos, and token swap provider Kyber Network. The wins have not gone unnoticed: LINK tokens are up more than 300% year to date.

This latest development for Chainlink shows that major telecom businesses are increasingly accepting of and interested in dealing with decentralized infrastructure.

"We're excited to see real enterprises seeing value in servicing Oracle requests on various blockchains,” Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov told Decrypt.

The capability to provide quality real-time data on secure, battle-tested infrastructure offers an early glimpse of what the world may look like in a few years as legacy institutions in finance, communications, government, and more better understand the value of decentralized technology.