>>60877091
1. Cardano is a blockchain like Ethereum. However, they adopted a horrific language which has completely fucked their adoption. Meanwhile everyone else went the EVM route. This is why Chainlink would have charged them so much (I would suspected $10m+) as Chainlink has to do a lot of bespoke work to deploy there. The other major project that didn't go the EVM route is Solana and they bit the bullet and paid up to get Chainlink deployed this year. By comparison, any EVM-based chain can be rapidly integrated by Chainlink.
2. Chainlink is not a blockchain. Blockchains are highly secure islands, isolated by design and do not know about external events and data. For example, the price of NVDA or the temperature in New York. Chainlink provides the connectivity both between this external data and blockchains _and_ between the blockchains themselves in a highly secure manner by using the same logic of blockchains - decentralization via multiple parties who are economically incentivized to reach consensus.