On New Year’s Eve, Chainlink tweeted a compilation of its greatest achievements in 2023. The list features some impressive figures, including 11.5+ billion data points delivered onchain and $9.3+ trillion in total transaction value enabled (TVE). There are also now more than 2,000 projects in the Chainlink Ecosystem, including 85+ members of Chainlink SCALE and Chainlink BUILD.
In 2023, 50,000+ people signed up to attend 250+ Chainlink meetups in 30+ countries and there were more than 32,000 registered participants in Chainlink hackathons. Some hackathoners even organized their own onsite regional gatherings like Chainlink Turkey’s 30-Hour Hackathon Connect Event in preparation for the Chainlink Spring Hackathon.
Over the summer, Swift, the world’s biggest provider of secure financial messaging services, successfully collaborated with more than a dozen top financial institutions, including Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ), BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), to demonstrate how entities can use Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to transact with a range of public and private blockchains.
Swift’s proof of concept illustrated how CCIP would allow more than 11,000 global financial institutions to interact with the multi-blockchain economy using their existing financial infrastructure. This accelerated capital markets and enterprise adoption of CCIP to unlock exciting new use cases for $5.1 billion of Chainlink-powered tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), such as ANZ’s cross-chain green financial products.
In October, Vodafone, a leading telecommunications company in Europe and Africa, announced its Economy of Things (EoT) platform, Vodafone DAB, demonstrated how CCIP could transform the global cargo industry by facilitating the seamless transfer of cargo receipts between multiple parties across several different blockchains in order to avoid unnecessary delays.
CCIP was just one of several exciting Chainlink mainnet product launches in 2023. During his keynote address at SmartCon in Barcelona, Spain, Chainlink Labs Chief Product Officer Kemal El Moujahid announced the mainnet launch of Chainlink Functions (Beta), which allows smart contract developers to fetch data from any API, and Chainlink Data Streams, a pull-based oracle solution that allows dApps to consume data more cost-effectively and at lower latencies while reducing the risk of frontrunning and MEV.
The combination of low-latency market data and automated execution through Chainlink Automation can unlock ultra-fast, user-friendly DeFi derivatives products and enable highly performant decentralized exchanges like GMX, the largest decentralized perpetual exchange by Total Value Locked (TVL) on Arbitrum and Avalanche, which is currently leveraging Chainlink Data Streams.
Rounding out an incredible year, Chainlink released the latest upgrade to its native staking mechanism, Staking v0.2, which introduced greater flexibility, improved security guarantees, modular architecture, a dynamic rewards mechanism, and expanded access. Following a nine-day Priority Migration period for existing v0.1 stakers, v0.2’s expanded staking pool of 40,875,000 LINK tokens was completely filled six hours after opening Early Access.
Profiled as “The Crypto Oracle” on CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2023 list, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov reflected on Chainlink’s accomplishments in 2023 and looked toward the new year, telling CoinDesk his top priority in 2024 and beyond is ensuring CCIP becomes the global standard connecting capital markets to web3, creating a global internet of contracts fueled by the world’s largest liquidity layer.