The global financial system is undergoing a generational transformation. Current market infrastructure is characterized by siloed ledgers, latent settlement, and time-consuming reconciliation. Given the demands of an increasingly digitally-native economy, institutions are exploring new frameworks for issuing, settling, and servicing financial assets through tokenization.

By enabling real-time settlement, programmable compliance, streamlined reconciliation, and enhanced transparency, onchain systems can provide greater operational efficiency and broader market access. However, realizing these benefits at scale requires robust and reliable infrastructure and an orchestration layer that can service and satisfy a full array of requirements across compliance, privacy, interoperability, composability, security, data, and more.

This report explores how tokenization is evolving from experimental pilots into a strategic imperative for the world’s largest financial institutions, giving rise to a new technology category: onchain finance.

The Onchain Finance Megatrend

Tokenization has evolved from a niche experiment to a strategic priority for global financial institutions. Today’s tokenized asset market is composed of $300B in stablecoins, $17.4B in private credit, $8.2B in US government debt, $2.3B in commodities, and $1.4B in public equities. Estimates underscore the scale of this shift. A report by BCG and ADDX projects that up to $16T of real-world assets could be tokenized by 2030, spanning public equities, private markets, real estate, and debt instruments. Similarly, Citi forecasts $4-5T in tokenized digital securities and an additional $5T in tokenized trade finance volume over the same period. These projections reflect a growing consensus that tokenization will not remain peripheral, but become the default.

The drivers behind this momentum are pragmatic. Onchain systems offer improvements to operational efficiency, liquidity access, programmability, transparency, and auditability. Settlement cycles can be reduced from days to minutes, minimizing counterparty risk and reconciliation costs. Certain assets that were historically encumbered by high minimums or limited access can be fractionalized and distributed more broadly. Financial agreements, business logic, policy enforcement, settlement, asset servicing, and reconciliation can be codified into smart contracts.

hese benefits are not just theoretical but are already being realized in production. JPMorgan’s internal study of their Kinexys platform showed a 56% reduction in operating costs after integrating tokenization for intraday financing operations. Their study concluded, “Digital financing delivered unprecedented efficiency gains for the financial institution and proved to be a game-changer for optimizing its financing operations.” Tokenizing regulated assets like bank and central bank deposits could enable instant, 24/7 settlements on shared ledgers, reducing reliance on intermediaries and cutting transaction costs. As major banks collaborate on these networks, Deloitte forecasts that by 2030, one in four high-value international payments will use tokenized platforms, with cost savings of over $50 billion through a projected 12.5% reduction in cross-border payment costs.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, which has issued over $2.8B of its BUIDL fund onchain, believes that “the next step going forward will be the tokenization of financial assets, and that means every stock, every bond… will be on one general ledger.”

McKinsey estimates that “an end-to-end tokenized bond life cycle could unlock improved operational efficiencies of at least 40 percent through data clarity, automation, embedded compliance logic (for example, transferability rules encoded at a token level), and streamlined processes (for example, asset servicing). Additionally, lower costs, faster issuance, or fractionalization can improve financing for smaller issuers by enabling ‘just-in-time’ financing (that is, optimizing borrowing costs by raising specific amounts at specific times) and broadening the investor base by tapping into global pools of capital.”Institutional Challenges & Infrastructure Requirements

Despite its benefits, tokenization introduces a complex set of operational, regulatory, and technical challenges. Adequately meeting these challenges requires a comprehensive infrastructure stack that is purpose-built for the end-to-end lifecycle management of a spectrum of financial instruments. 

Institutions must satisfy KYC, AML, and jurisdictional requirements without compromising the benefits of composability and traceability. While blockchains are open and public by design, financial regulations demand selective disclosure, identity verification, transaction privacy, and configurable access controls. Tokenized systems must embed privacy protection and compliance capabilities.

Increasingly, real-world assets (RWAs) and stablecoins are utilized across a broad set of distinct blockchains operating on different runtimes, each hosting unique end-applications for tokenized asset utilization. Institutions may operate across private and permissioned networks, public blockchains, and offchain systems, and require interoperability across all of these systems. For tokenized assets to move seamlessly across these domains, secure, compliant, private, and reliable cross-chain messaging is mandatory.

Tokenized assets require real-time access to offchain data to function correctly. This includes market prices, NAV, corporate actions, interest rates, economic indicators, and identity attestations. Without secure and reliable mechanisms to verify and deliver this data onchain, blockchain systems cannot ensure accurate valuation, proper execution, or adherence to regulatory requirements.

Institutions require deterministic and atomic settlement across a multichain or hybrid environment. Finality must be both technically sound and legally recognized. Moreover, the infrastructure must support complex workflows such as contingent execution, net settlement, asset delivery-vs-payment, and synchronization with current payment and messaging networks like Swift.

The infrastructure to service growth in onchain finance must satisfy all of these conditions simultaneously. Failure to meet one condition, be it compliance, data integrity, or cross-chain interoperability, can render a tokenized product unviable. As such, institutional participation in onchain finance hinges on comprehensive and integrated infrastructure that can support the full spectrum of technical and operational needs.

As the financial world shifts toward onchain systems, the need for robust, secure, and reliable infrastructure is foundational. As users from both DeFi and TradFi build out these new applications, institutions require security, privacy, reliability, flexibility, and composability across a spectrum of both onchain and offchain systems to fully satisfy their intended use-cases. Chainlink is the only platform that delivers secure data feeds, privacy-preserving data management, cross-chain messaging, policy and compliance enforcement tools with a fully composable development and orchestration environment.

This report explores how the Chainlink platform and its core standards across data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy, provide reliable infrastructure for both DeFi and TradFi institutions to build a new generation of financial applications.

Chainlink has evolved from a leading data oracle provider into a comprehensive platform of oracle services. It is the only platform offering a complete collection of operating standards to service the full lifecycle of tokenized assets and onchain finance. Its infrastructure has expanded beyond purely data delivery to host a collection of composable standards that form the foundation of any onchain finance use case. Similar to the internet’s reliance on foundational protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP, Chainlink provides composable primitives upon which complex and complete tokenized asset workflows can be built. What a virtual machine is to a blockchain, Chainlink Runtime Environment is to Chainlink’s oracle networks: a computing environment where oracle networks can be programmed to execute any workflow. Each standard is modular yet integrated, allowing developers and institutions to tailor infrastructure stacks that meet specific operational and regulatory requirements without introducing fragmentation or counterparty risk. These standards encompass data, interoperability, compliance, privacy, and orchestration.

​​The Chainlink Platform

For example, consider the lifecycle of a tokenized investment fund. The Chainlink data standard ensures the fund continuously receives trusted information (e.g., NAV calculations, market prices, corporate actions details, etc.) through secure decentralized oracle networks. The Chainlink interoperability standard (through CCIP) enables the fund’s tokens and associated data to traverse distinct blockchains and existing financial systems, ensuring connectivity across various environments. The compliance and privacy standards, implemented through the Automated Compliance Engine (Chainlink ACE) and Confidential Compute, guarantee that transactions adhere to jurisdictional requirements and confidentiality mandates. Together, these components allow tokenized assets to operate with the same regulatory integrity and operational assurance as traditional financial instruments, but with the added benefits of automation, composability, and real-time settlement.

Chainlink’s service offerings are underpinned by decentralized oracle networks (DONs), meaning multiple independent nodes fetch and deliver data to smart contracts, with the results aggregated onchain to produce a single, reliable source of truth. The network’s node operators include professional infrastructure teams and highly reputable entities, and the system has demonstrated an impeccable record of reliability. By design, no single point of failure or individual oracle can corrupt the output, and the use of LINK tokens for node operator fees and staking aligns incentives for honest performance.

Chainlink’s oracle networks are blockchain-agnostic, offering native support for 70+ public blockchains (including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Solana, and other layer-2 networks) as well as private/consortium chains. This broad support lets developers “integrate once, deploy everywhere” and has made Chainlink oracles the standard for onchain financial applications.

Chainlink currently dominates the DeFi oracle market. As of Q3 2025, Chainlink oracles secure roughly 68% of all value that depends on an oracle, and over 83% of the value on Ethereum specifically. More than 2,000 Chainlink Data Feeds are live, collectively securing over $95 billion in onchain value across 450+ applications. Chainlink oracles have delivered over 18 billion data points onchain and enabled more than $26 trillion in transaction value.

Onchain finance requires reliable data beyond just price, including NAV, corporate actions such as dividends and splits, fund metrics, and more. To meet these requirements, the Chainlink data standard provides a framework that enables developers to securely bring any external data onchain and use it as part of their blockchain transactions. This enables smart contracts to reference accurate, real-time information across virtually any market, ensuring that tokenized assets remain synchronized with their offchain equivalents.

The US Department of Commerce worked with Chainlink to bring official macroeconomic indicators (GDP, CPI, etc.) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis onchain via Chainlink Data Feeds. Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which operates the NYSE and global market data services, is providing its high-quality FX and precious metals price feeds to smart contracts through Chainlink’s network. 

Traditional financial institutions can also leverage Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure to distribute their high-quality data onchain to be utilized within onchain applications. DataLink extends the Chainlink data standard into an institutional-grade data publishing service. It allows financial institutions, data vendors, and enterprises to distribute proprietary or bespoke datasets onto blockchain networks through Chainlink’s secure and reliable oracle infrastructure. This capability unlocks new use cases for onchain data types, including ESG metrics, credit risk models, custody, settlement, or derivatives pricing. 

For example, S&P Global has announced that they are using DataLink to publish their Stablecoin Stability Assessments onchain. Additionally, Deutsche Börse is using DataLink to bring real-time data from Europe’s largest derivatives exchange onchain, including Deutsche Börse Group's Eurex, Xetra, 360T, and Tradegate trading venues covering equities, derivatives, and forex instruments. Similarly, FTSE Russell is using DataLink to publish their index data onchain. For institutions entering the onchain financial system, DataLink offers a bridge between traditional data distribution models and programmable, interoperable financial systems.

S&P Dow Jones Indices and Dinari have partnered with Chainlink for the S&P Digital Markets 50 Index, the first tokenized benchmark combining US equities and digital assets. Chainlink will deliver real-time index values and token prices using its oracle infrastructure on the Avalanche blockchain. The integration includes Price Feeds, Proof of Reserve, NAVLink, and SmartAUM, with future plans to incorporate additional data feeds and compliance tools.

Similarly, WisdomTree, a global asset manager with over $130 billion in AUM, has partnered with Chainlink to bring real-time NAV data onchain for its CRDT tokenized private credit fund. The CRDT fund offers exposure to a diversified portfolio of liquid private credit assets, tracking the Gapstow Liquid Alternative Credit Index (GLACI). By integrating the Chainlink data standard on Ethereum, WisdomTree enables seamless, transparent, and auditable fund subscriptions and redemptions via its Prime and Connect platforms.

By enabling customizable and authenticated data publication, institutions can distribute, monetize, and manage their unique datasets onchain with cryptographic guarantees of accuracy and provenance. This offering extends Chainlink’s role not only as the dominant oracle provider but also as a comprehensive infrastructure layer for the data requirements of onchain finance.

Lending and borrowing activities constitute a core onchain financial primitive, with now over $80B in capital supplied and over $30B in active loans. These applications require rigorous risk management to ensure efficient and timely liquidations and no occurrence of bad debt. Historically, these applications have offered liquidation bonuses of ~10% of the liquidation value as an incentive to keepers or MEV bots to call and execute a liquidation.

SVR is Chainlink’s offering for recapturing the non-toxic MEV that an application may generate and leak from liquidations. Rather than allowing block producers or external searchers to capture arbitrage profits from a liquidation, SVR introduces a competitive auction mechanism targeting specifically the value associated with an oracle price update (oracle extractable value, “OEV”). SVR is implemented in a way that is minimally intrusive for protocols already using Chainlink oracles, as it doesn’t require complex new contracts on the protocol side. 

Under the hood, the initial version of SVR integrates with Flashbots’ MEV-Share system. Instead of publishing a new price directly onchain for anyone to act on and extract value, Chainlink nodes route the price update through a private mempool where a backrun liquidation transaction can be bundled with the oracle update. The “dual aggregator” architecture offers two paths for a liquidation: one path where the price update is delivered along with a liquidation transaction from an SVR auction, and another fallback path where, if the MEV capture doesn’t execute, the price feed reverts to a standard update. This ensures no loss of liveness, as the protocol will still get a price update even if the SVR auction fails. When an oracle update leads to a profitable liquidation, the profit is captured by the SVR system via a competitive auction among searchers, with the proceeds of the auction then split between the DeFi protocol and Chainlink. 

SVR is currently in its Phase 3 rollout on Aave’s Ethereum market, increasing coverage to ~75% of Aave’s Ethereum TVS, which represents ~95% of Aave’s OEV-relevant TVS. This market accounts for $42B in deposits and $17.2B in active loans, representing DeFi’s largest lending and borrowing venue with ~60% market share. As the SVR rollout has progressed from Phase 1 into Phase 3, the results show promising efficacy in recapturing value for the protocol. Across $265M in liquidations paying out $12.5M in liquidation bonuses, over $7M has been recaptured.   

Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) enables secure cross-chain communication, allowing data, tokens, and tokens with instructions to move between different blockchain environments. As onchain finance expands across fragmented systems, including public blockchains and private ledgers, CCIP addresses a critical requirement by providing the ability for tokenized assets and the data that underpins them to move seamlessly across chains while preserving compliance logic, asset metadata, and operational continuity.

Architecturally, CCIP is built on Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network model—the same infrastructure that has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value. Every cross-chain transaction is handled by multiple DONs in parallel. In the current design, at least two primary oracle networks are involved, a Committing DON that initiates and commits a message on the source chain, and an Executing DON that receives and executes the message on the destination chain. In addition to the two DONs for multiple layers of security, CCIP boasts modular risk management features like Token Developer Attestation, which enables asset issuers to provide an additional layer of verification for the cross-chain transfers of their assets. CCIP is also equipped with compliance capabilities through the Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (Chainlink ACE) as a part of the Chainlink platform. Chainlink ACE allows for checks before and during the transaction flow so that asset issuers can embed policy logic to meet their diverse set of requirements.