In a recent fireside chat, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explained why he considers Chainlink ($LINK) a “winner”.

Schmidt, whom Forbes currently calls the world’s 90th richest person with a net worth of $16.8 billion (as of 3 October 2022), made his comments during a fireside chat with Chainlink Labs Co-Founder and CEO Sergey Nazarov at SmartCon 2022, which was held September 28-29, 2022 in New York City.

According to a report by The Daily Hodl, Schmidt said:

At the end of the day, the companies that won in Web2 were better technology. They put more capital to work, and they moved faster, and they scaled faster. And these are network businesses, so once you get a little bit ahead it’s very hard to catch up to the person ahead of you.

In [Chainlink’s] case because you were early and very smart obviously, you got in there first, so you see it from the standpoint of the the person who’s ahead. So I think that in Web3 you’re going to see the same dynamic of new things entering...

The winners – and I think this is absolutely true of Chainlink – they have better technology and it scales better. I’m now speaking as a computer scientist. You’ve got to get the architecture right so you can go from 10 users to 10 million users, and most of the systems… and this is not a comment about Chainlink, it’s about others, seem to fall over reasonably quickly. That’s my observation. They’re just not built to scale yet, and it’s just harder... You can’t do it in six months. It takes real computer science, real planning [and] real platforms.

On October 1, Chainlink Labs announced on Twitter that in Q3 2022 Chainlink ecosystem had “expanded to 1500+ projects across 15 blockchains.” Of the four key milestones they mentioned, the main one seemed to be that $16.8 trillion worth of transactions been enabled by Chainlink in 2022.