Chainlink significantly accelerated global blockchain and digital asset adoption in June.
Headlining a series of landmark announcements is Chainlink’s partnership with Mastercard, which allows over three billion cardholders to buy crypto directly onchain via Swapper Finance – a unified, compliant, intuitive interface that bridges the gap between crypto-native and real-world user experience through secure fiat-to-crypto conversion.
In conversation with Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov on Global Custodian’s “The Future Is On” podcast, Mastercard’s Executive Vice President, Blockchain & Digital Assets, Raj Dhamodharan, described the collaboration as a “perfect alignment” providing secure, seamless connectivity between onchain asset exchange and offchain transactions.
On stage at Blockworks’ Permissionless IV event in New York, Nazarov and Mastercard’s SVP of Blockchain Products, Izzy Iliev-Wolitzer, highlighted how decreasing friction and increasing convenience are key to bringing everyday consumers onchain.
“Consumers are creatures of habit, and to really reach the next billion consumers, the next five billion consumers, you want to make sure that you tap into those habits and make it easy for them to interact with the blockchain in a way they’re familiar with,” Iliev-Wolitzer said.
The new Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) is a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services across public and private blockchains.
Launched in collaboration with Apex Group, GLEIF, and the ERC-3643 Association, ACE unlocks critical compliance-focused use cases including reusable digital identities, automated policy enforcement, cross-chain compliant-enabled digital asset settlement, and regulated asset usage in DeFi protocols.
Nazarov said ACE makes “faster, cheaper, and more accurate compliance a key defining benefit” of digital assets that are superior to their traditional counterparts and called ACE the “compliance and identity standard the tokenized asset economy has been waiting for” which provides “a final critical building block for over $100 trillion in institutional capital to move onchain.”
Built on the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), ACE’s architecture enables compliance logic to be reusable, upgradeable, and enforceable across any combination of token standards, execution environments, or legal jurisdictions, dramatically reducing onboarding costs and operational complexity while enhancing compliance reliability and scalability for regulated onchain finance.
Adoption of the Chainlink standard, which supports a spectrum of tokenized real-world asset and stablecoin issuers from top DeFi protocols to some of the world’s largest financial institutions, continued to accelerate in June.
A new report from Visa illustrates how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) enables the simulated secure exchange of ANZ Bank’s A$DC stablecoin with Hong Kong’s e-HKD CBDC to purchase Fidelity International’s simulated tokenized fund. The use case demonstrates how an Australian investor can use A$DC to purchase tokenized money market fund units from Hong Kong using the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) and Chainlink to ensure secure interoperability and compliance.
BOB (Build on Bitcoin), a hybrid layer-2 designed to unlock Bitcoin DeFi (BTCFi), initiated an upgrade to CCIP for cross-chain transfers of Circle’s widely used USD-pegged stablecoin, USDC. The upgrade is slated to accelerate stablecoin adoption and future-proof stablecoin liquidity on the BOB network.
Maple Finance, an onchain lending firm with $1.9 billion in assets under management, announced it officially integrated CCIP and adopted the Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard to transfer its native yield-bearing stablecoin, syrupUSDC, across Ethereum and Solana.
HashKey Chain, a compliance-focused layer-2 connecting capital markets and DeFi, announced it’s deepening its integration of CCIP by adopting the CCT standard to expand the utility of its native token, HSK.
Chainlink, Astar Network, and Optimism announced CCIP is powering the first live deployment of a SuperchainERC20-compatible CCT on Soneium Mainnet via the CCT standard. Astar Network’s native utility, governance, and staking token, ASTR, is now a CCT connecting Astar Network to Soneium.
Olympus, a programmatic treasury-backed framework for monetary policy, credit, and liquidity, integrated CCIP as its canonical cross-chain infrastructure following a unanimous DAO vote. Olympus is leveraging the CCT standard to support cross-chain transfers of its native token, OHM.
Global blockchain gaming platform WEMIX expanded its CCIP integration to support the new USDC.e stablecoin, designed to facilitate seamless and secure transfers of Circle’s widely used, USD-pegged stablecoin, USDC, on the WEMIX3.0 mainnet.
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