Today during SmartCon, the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) – a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts – officially went live, sparking the next wave of innovation needed to bring the global financial system onchain at scale.
CRE allows developers to build multi-chain, multi-oracle, multi-jurisdictional smart contracts with inherent compliance and legacy system connectivity faster than ever before. Designed to dramatically accelerate the rate at which institutional capital can flow onchain, CRE is built to capture the $867 trillion market opportunity for use cases including tokenized real-world assets, stablecoins, and onchain delivery versus payment (DvP).
Leading financial institutions, web2 enterprises, and web3 protocols are already putting CRE to work:
- Kinexys by J.P. Morgan and Ondo Finance recently announced the success of a cross-chain DvP test transaction powered by CRE. Brought to scale, the novel onchain DvP solution could reduce counterparty and settlement risk from system fragmentation and manual workflows that cost market participants more than $914 billion over the past decade.
- 24 of the world’s largest financial services institutions including Swift and Euroclear participated in Chainlink’s initiative to solve the industry’s $58 billion corporate actions problem. The system uses CRE to validate AI model outputs and transform them into ISO 20022-compliant messages that are transmitted to the Swift network and relayed cross-chain via Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
- Swift and UBS are leveraging CRE to manage tokenized fund workflows using the existing ISO 20022 messaging standard. The first use case comprised a technical and operational pilot with UBS Tokenize, the tokenization unit of UBS Asset Management, one of the world’s largest private banks with over $6 trillion in assets under management.
- 21X, the first EU-regulated onchain exchange, adopted CRE in production to power its exchange with verifiable post-trade data, including last traded prices and bid-ask offers, for securities listed on the 21X platform.
- Mastercard and Swapper Finance co-developed a payments solution on CRE that enables Mastercard’s 3.5 billion credit card holders to purchase crypto assets on decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap.
- Global technology company Pairpoint is collaborating with Chainlink and using CRE to unlock new usage-based, asset-as-a-service financing for telecom infrastructure with AI capabilities.
Because CRE compresses the development of advanced smart contracts from months to weeks and even days, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov believes it’s an innovation on par with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
In an official statement, Nazarov said, “Smart contracts have evolved into a more complex form, requiring synchronization across chains, connectivity to data and identity, as well as synchronization with many other existing systems. These advanced institutional smart contracts have previously taken months to years to get right, and with the launch of CRE we can now reduce that down to weeks or even just days.”
Chainlink also announced plans to launch a breakthrough confidential compute service on CRE that will unlock a new class of private smart contracts. Chainlink Confidential Compute, planned for release in early 2026, will connect real-world financial data and web2 systems across chains while keeping proprietary data, business logic, external connectivity, and computation completely confidential.
To learn more about CRE, read the official product blog.