The latest episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” series features Max Heinzle, CEO of Europe’s first regulated tokenized securities trading and settlement system, 21X. Heinzle explained why Chainlink’s decentralized oracle infrastructure is integral to making traditional financial products better and more globally accessible onchain.
This week, 21X officially adopted the Chainlink standard to deliver market data onchain for its tokenized securities. The integration is live on the public Polygon blockchain and powered by the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), which makes it faster and easier to build decentralized applications that are compatible with existing financial systems.
21X is a Frankfurt-based financial institution and the first blockchain-based exchange for tokenized securities licensed under the EU’s DLT Regime. Last year, 21X announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink to enrich tokenized assets with high-quality data and facilitate cross-chain interoperability. Trading began on the platform when it officially launched last week.
Heinzle explained how blockchains, smart contracts, and oracles are transforming finance.
“Here we are with a market infrastructure that is truly unique as we, for the first time in the history of capital markets, enable atomic matching and settlement onchain.”
Tokenized real-world assets such as equity, bonds, and funds also permit fractionalization and programmability with better liquidity, transparency, and risk management.
“Making capital markets directly accessible, being self-custody-enabled, and at the same time eliminating necessities such as clearing and also alongside that settlement risk should lead to a revolution of the financial industry,” Heinzle said.
Using Chainlink’s hyper-reliable oracle infrastructure, which has facilitated over $25 trillion in transaction value, 21X’s market data is automatically retrieved from onchain contracts, aggregated, and published in a standardized, machine-readable format on Polygon, where it is accessible to market participants, custody providers, DeFi protocols, and risk management systems.
“We need to find ways to make it easy for users to seamlessly interact with the trading venue and for the market to have the deepest liquidity possible,” Heinzle explained. “And we are working with Chainlink to enable exactly that.”
As the industry-leading decentralized oracle network, Chainlink secures nearly $100 billion throughout DeFi and facilitates secure interoperability across more than 60 distinct blockchain networks.
Heinzle emphasized how Chainlink’s “critical market infrastructure” establishes a universal framework for onchain data and interoperability.
“Some degree of standardization needs to take place and obviously data streaming is essential for capital markets. These are key topics that we need to get right.”
Watch the latest episode of “The Future Is On” featuring 21X CEO Max Heinzle.