This week, Chainlink Labs’ Chief Business Officer, Johann Eid, appeared on The Rollup to explain what sets Chainlink’s security apart.
As the industry-leading oracle platform, Chainlink has enabled over $30 trillion in transaction value and powers the vast majority of DeFi. Chainlink also provides the secure and reliable data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy traditional finance requires to tokenize real-world assets onchain.
Chainlink is the only data and interoperability oracle platform that meets three key institutional security standards: SOC 2 Type 1, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO/IEC 27001:2022, which cover Chainlink Data Feeds (Price Feeds, Proof of Reserve, and NAV), as well as Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Chainlink’s node architecture ensures security by default. More than 2,000 Chainlink Price Feeds hold over 67% of the total oracle market, securing over 83% of the value on Ethereum and nearly 100% of the value on Base.
“The smallest network we have on CCIP is 16 nodes and these 16 nodes are not run by Chainlink; they’re run by different entities,” Eid explained.
“You would need to hack at least 11 of them to create an issue.”
This exponentially increases security compared to bridge solutions with just one or two centrally controlled nodes.
For Chainlink, the goal is balancing the benefits of DeFi, like composability, with controls and circuit breakers that layer rewards, not risk.
“Risk management will allow us to have the good kind of composability, where good assets are interacting with other good assets,” said Eid.
“Being able to freeze assets and being able to have circuit breakers is not contrary to having composable DeFi. I think it actually improves it, because it makes good assets even better by being able to leverage them more and being able to protect them more by not mixing them with bad assets.”
Chainlink’s security isn’t just architectural; it’s economic.
“Chainlink node operators make 70% of their business revenue through Chainlink so they’re able to have people working on security 24/7,” Eid said.
“A lot of these cross-chain systems out there – if they’re decentralized, which is a big if – the node operators are not actually making money, which means they don’t care about running the nodes.”
For Chainlink, meeting traditional finance’s security standards, including SOC 2 Type 1, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO/IEC 27001:2022, is key to building the future onchain.
“At some point, this space has to go beyond “trust me bro” in terms of security and I think these certificates are really critical in that regard,” Eid said.
“It just solidifies why we’re working with so many of these traditional finance players.”
Watch the full conversation.