During Digital Asset Summit 2026 in NYC, Chainlink Labs’ Principal Solutions Lead, Charles Durkin, joined hosts Andy and Robbie live on The Rollup to discuss why Chainlink’s blockchain-agnostic decentralized oracle services are key to bringing traditional financial institutions onchain.
“You can see that all of Wall Street is here, actively talking about how to explore blockchain technology,” Durkin said of this year’s event.
Previously a senior product manager at Citi, Durkin believes traditional financial institutions are poised to gain significant advantages onchain.
“Being able to have more efficient markets and reduce your tech spend is going to greatly benefit all of the participants that are here this week.”
He emphasized Chainlink’s unique ability to deliver this efficiency with the enterprise-grade security that institutions need.
“We are the infrastructure that is underpinning bringing data and connecting systems onchain.”
This week, Coinbase integrated Chainlink’s institutional-grade data publishing service, DataLink, to bring premium exchange data underpinning billions in trading activity onchain. Coinbase also uses Proof of Reserve to increase the transparency of billions of dollars in BTC reserves, and selected Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as the exclusive bridging solution for $7 billion in wrapped assets.
Durkin described working with large institutions like Coinbase as Chainlink’s bread and butter.
“They need to ensure that security is first and foremost, which is what Chainlink provides.”
Chainlink supplies additional services for regulated financial institutions, including Automated Compliance Engine (ACE), a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services across public and private blockchains, and the Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard, which defines how transfer agents and fund administrators can support tokenized assets in alignment with existing regulatory frameworks.
“It’s really a full stack of connectivity layers that these banks and asset managers can use as Lego bricks,” Durkin explained.
“Rather than doing a piecemeal pulling together of different vendors and having a non-scalable go-to-market, you come to Chainlink and we’re able to provide the full service in a cohesive fashion.”
He said the atmosphere at this year’s Digital Asset Summit indicates a clear path toward institutional blockchain adoption.
“What’s exciting is that all of these institutions are very eager to learn. These conversations are no longer “Why should we do this?” It’s “How should we do this?”
Watch the full conversation.