Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov began the new year by reflecting on 2025’s biggest achievements and outlining what he hopes to see in 2026. He highlighted plans to enhance the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) with a novel confidential compute service that will unlock private smart contracts – the last missing piece needed to bring global finance onchain.
He predicted digital assets such as stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) will continue to gain recognition as a superior asset class that promotes global liquidity and connectivity with less friction, cost, and complexity.
Swift achieved a new digital asset milestone with BNP Paribas, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Societe Generale – FORGE in a landmark trial that established the seamless exchange and settlement of tokenized bonds with support for payments in fiat and digital currencies.
The breakthrough builds on Swift’s ongoing work to advance digital asset interoperability through Chainlink’s decentralized oracle infrastructure including Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), CRE, and the Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) technical standard.
DeFi gained secure access to U.S. equity and ETF market data 24 hours per day, 5 days per week, including after-hours and overnight sessions, with the launch of Chainlink’s 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams across more than 40 blockchains. 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams unlock the U.S. stock market onchain with more reliable pricing, safer liquidations, stronger risk management, and consistent user experiences beyond standard trading hours.
Top exchanges including Lighter and BitMEX are already leveraging 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams to power continuous RWA markets with context-aware data such as mid-price, bid-ask data, last trade prices, volumes, market-status flags, and staleness indicators that power use cases such as perpetuals and derivatives, prediction markets, synthetic equities and ETFs, lending markets, and structured products and vaults.
Chainlink and FastLane announced Chainlink’s acquisition of Atlas, a generalized execution abstraction protocol which now exclusively supports Chainlink’s Smart Value Recapture (SVR), the most widely adopted Oracle Extractable Value (OEV) recapture solution.
SVR has processed over $460 million in liquidations and recaptured more than $10 million in OEV, which provides DeFi protocols with an additional revenue stream. Uniting Atlas’s proven order flow auction technology with SVR expands SVR to new blockchain ecosystems and boosts revenue for the DeFi economy.
Chainlink’s ecosystem continued to expand in January.
Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX announced the launch of Equity Perps, a new derivatives product that gives traders exposure to major U.S. stocks and equity indices using cryptocurrency as collateral. Equity Perps is powered by Chainlink Data Streams.
Chainlink Labs officially joined the Global Alliance for KRW Stablecoins (GAKS) led by WEMADE, one of South Korea’s largest game developers. Chainlink will play a critical role in ensuring KRW stablecoins pegged to the South Korean Won maintain data integrity and stability aligned with global financial market standards.
CME Group, the world’s largest crypto derivatives marketplace, announced plans to expand its suite of regulated cryptocurrency derivatives with the launch of LINK futures (5,000 LINK) and Micro LINK futures (250 LINK), pending regulatory review.
Liquidity distribution protocol Turtle, which has coordinated over $5.5 billion in liquidity and serves over 410,000 participants worldwide, announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink to accelerate the institutional adoption of onchain capital markets. Turtle has made Chainlink Data Feeds and CCIP a requirement to ensure safe, risk-minimized liquidity provisioning.
View the entire Chainlink ecosystem in one place.
