This week, Chainlink launched 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams to unlock the $80 trillion U.S. stock market onchain. Chainlink Labs Chief Business Officer Johann Eid appeared on The Rollup with hosts Andy and Robbie to discuss how tokenized equities are a significant milestone toward a more efficient and composable global financial system.
Eid explained the business case for making U.S. equity and ETF market data available 24 hours per day, 5 days per week, including after-hours and overnight sessions.
“Every stock market around the world is becoming more and more globalized,” he said.
“This means you actually want equities to be trading 24/7, because more and more stock markets are meant for a global audience, not for a local audience.”
Top exchanges Lighter and BitMEX, as well as ApeX, HelloTrade, Decibel, Monaco, Opinion Labs, and Orderly Network, are already leveraging 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams to power continuous tokenized real-world asset (RWA) markets. Offering benefits such as atomic settlement, fractionalization, programmability, global access, and increased capital efficiency, the RWA market is projected to reach $30 trillion by 2030.
Eid believes tokenizing traditional asset classes like equities onchain benefits TradFi as well as DeFi and crypto, because it helps achieve the industry’s ultimate objective.
“How do we tokenize the whole world? That’s our main motto,” he said.
“Being able to have one protocol which has U.S. equities, Hong Kong equities, South American equities in one single place – that’s the main goal of crypto.”
24/5 U.S. Equities Streams deliver context-aware data including mid-price, bid-ask data, last trade prices, volumes, market-status flags, and staleness indicators directly onchain to unlock use cases such as perpetuals and derivatives, prediction markets, synthetic equities and ETFs, lending markets, and structured products and vaults.
“As we get more and more sophisticated players, they actually need more data points onchain to be able to create the most efficient market,” said Eid.
He emphasized the mutually beneficial relationship between TradFi and DeFi.
“It’s really this shared exchange between what TradFi brings to us, what we bring to TradFi, and then being able to create the ultimate experience for people around these two exchanges.”
Chainlink secures the vast majority of DeFi, having facilitated over $27 trillion in transaction value while simultaneously accelerating institutional blockchain adoption by enabling privacy and compliance through infrastructure like the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) and Automated Compliance Engine (ACE).
“I think we are probably one of the most pragmatic companies in the space because we have a very clear mission, which is how do I bridge these two worlds? How do I make these two worlds interact? And we don’t really deviate from this in any aspect.”
Watch the full interview.