Today, Chainlink released the new Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) – a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services across public and private blockchains – in collaboration with leading market participants Apex Group, GLEIF, and the ERC-3643 Association.
With a modular, privacy-preserving framework that integrates existing identity systems with onchain infrastructure to support onchain and offchain policy enforcement, Chainlink ACE lays the groundwork for more than $100 trillion in institutional capital to enter the onchain economy.
Currently available for early access by select institutions, ACE unlocks vital onchain compliance-focused use cases including reusable digital identities, automated policy enforcement, cross-chain compliant-enabled digital asset settlement, and regulated asset usage in DeFi protocols.
Built on the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a unified computing platform that streamlines access to Chainlink’s essential tokenization services, ACE’s architecture enables compliance logic to be reusable, upgradeable, and enforceable across any combination of token standards, execution environments, or legal jurisdictions. This significantly reduces onboarding costs and operational complexity while enhancing compliance reliability and scalability for regulated onchain finance.
In an official announcement, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov explained the goal of Chainlink ACE is “to make faster, cheaper, and more accurate compliance a key defining benefit of making or owning digital assets” that are superior to their traditional counterparts.
“Chainlink ACE is the compliance and identity standard the tokenized asset economy has been waiting for, with today’s launch providing a final critical building block for over $100 trillion in institutional capital to move onchain,” he said. “By collaborating closely with global leaders such as Apex Group, GLEIF, and the ERC-3643 Association, Chainlink ACE is unlocking critical industry requirements to move to its final stage of mass adoption.”
Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF (the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation) which oversees use of the vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier), said, “We welcome the integration of the vLEI into Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine as a powerful example of how verifiable organizational identity can enhance compliance across blockchain ecosystems.”
Dennis O’Connell, President of the ERC-3643 Association which promotes the adoption of the ERC-3643 token standard for real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization, said, “Partnering with Chainlink has enabled the ERC-3643 standard to become interoperable, dynamic, and policy-driven. By embedding Chainlink ACE and vLEI into the ERC-3643 framework, permissioned tokens can easily enforce jurisdiction-specific rules onchain.”
Zion Hilelly, Chief Product Officer of Apex Group, which recently acquired the Chainlink-powered enterprise-grade tokenization platform Tokeny, called the collaboration with Chainlink a milestone in scaling compliance-focused digital assets.
“Chainlink’s technology, combined with our existing tokenisation and on-chain finance capabilities, will set the standard for compliance on DLT,” he said. “We are bridging key compliance requirements with seamless blockchain execution.”