TRON Oracle JustLINK faces Immediate Criticism Upon Launch

The TRON oracle service JustLink has faced a lot of criticism right upon launch as Bridge Oracle claims that Justin Sun stole the ideas and copied the code so let’s read more in today’s TRON news.

JustLink has gone live on Tron as the blockchain’s first official oracle platform. The oracles like JustLink are designed to handle price data for blockchain apps and exchanges. Competing projects and their communities claim that JustLink borrows the code and concepts from the existing work. The CEO Of Tron Justin Sun called the project Tron’s first-ever oracle JustLink was drawing a lot of its ideas from a previously built oracle on the network called Bridge Oracle.

Hi Justin, we started a year ago to plan the first oracle system on the tron network, but it wasn't for justlink.. but for #bridge_oracle.

we had several chat with your team including roy liu, will be nice to chat with you to discuss about this matter because that was our idea.. https://t.co/DZb4Qi2Ddm

— Estavi (@sinaEstavi) October 30, 2020

Developers in the Tron Defi ecosystem can use JustLink oracles to retrieve crypto-related data such as lending prices, derivatives prices, stable coin exchange rates, and market estimations. The data can be used in various blockchain projects like decentralized exchanges and synthetic asset platforms. JustLink oracles will be powered with node providers that will make the JST tokens collaterals. If the nodes provide incorrect information, the network will automatically penalize node operators and refund the service which requested the data.

The project compared itself to the existing Chainlink oracle solutions which were used by Ethereum-based Defi projects at the moment. Chainlink is now the biggest oracle token by market cap. The announcement was met with a lot of backlash as Hassan Golmohammadi, the CTO of another TRON-based oracle named Bridge Oracle, complained that Tron stole its idea and code. He claimed that Bridge Oracle was the first oracle on Tron and claimed that his company discussed marketing with the Tron team and that JustLink stole all aspects of the oracle platform. Other commenters sides with his complaints but it is not clear that those complaints have any legal merits.

In the meantime, the Chainlink community found mentions of Chainlink’s token in JustLink’s code suggesting that JustLink borrows a lot from Chainlink rather than Bridge Oracle. Chainlink and Bridge are both open source projects which means that JustLink can use their code with proper attribution. Even if Sun’s platform is right, critics will see the service as evidence that Tron is highly derivative especially with the many previous controversies around its whitepaper plagiarism and code borrowing.  The Tron Foundation or Just Network didn’t reply to requests for comments.