Chainlink Cements Dominance in Onchain Finance as Wall Street Floods In

The oracle wars are over—Chainlink just won. While other protocols scramble for niche use cases, LINK is quietly becoming the indispensable plumbing for the entire onchain economy. Institutional money isn't just testing the waters anymore; it's building entire financial infrastructures on top of it.

The New Backbone

Forget speculative trading. The real action is in tokenized real-world assets, cross-border settlements, and automated derivatives—all hungry for bulletproof, real-world data. Chainlink's decentralized oracle networks are the only game in town for institutions that can't afford a single point of failure. They're not adopting crypto; they're adopting Chainlink to bypass traditional, slower, and more expensive data feeds.

Growth by Default

This isn't about hype. It's about becoming the default choice. Every new institutional onchain pilot, every regulated DeFi product, and every major stablecoin expansion leans on Chainlink's infrastructure. The network effect is now a tidal wave—more integrations mean more security, which attracts more integrations. Competitors are left fighting for scraps.

A Cynical Nod to Tradition

Sure, the old guard of finance is getting involved—mostly to save on middle-office costs and finally automate processes that still run on fax-adjacent technology. The irony is thick: the very institutions that once dismissed crypto are now relying on its most utilitarian workhorse to modernize their own creaky systems.

The takeaway is stark. The race to provide decentralized data is no longer a race. Chainlink has lapped the field, and the growing stampede of institutional capital is just the validation. The future of onchain finance is being built, and it has Chainlink's name stamped on the foundation.

Government Adoption Accelerates

Government use of blockchain infrastructure marked progess during the year. Chainlink said the U.S. Department of Commerce partnered with the network to publish macroeconomic data onchain using Chainlink Data Feeds sourced from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov also participated in high-level policy discussions in Washington, including the White House Digital Asset Summit, as U.S. President Donald TRUMP signed the GENIUS Act into law.

The engagement underscores growing coordination between policymakers and blockchain infrastructure providers as regulatory clarity improves.

Banks and Capital Markets Move Onchain

In banking and capital markets, global financial institutions increasingly relied on Chainlink to execute production-grade onchain workflows.

The research cites a partnership with Mastercard allowing more than three billion cardholders to purchase crypto assets directly onchain via a Chainlink-powered application.

Asset managers also expanded tokenized offerings. UBS completed what Chainlink described as the world’s first live, end-to-end tokenized fund workflow using its Digital Transfer Agent standard while firms such as WisdomTree and FTSE Russell began publishing institutional-grade net asset value and index data onchain.

Financial market infrastructures, including DTCC, Euroclear, and SWIFT, collaborated with Chainlink to streamline corporate actions processing and cross-chain settlement using standardized messaging formats.

DeFi and Tokenization Scale Up

Decentralized finance and tokenization platforms also adopted Chainlink at scale in 2025. Coinbase selected Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as the exclusive bridge infrastructure for its wrapped assets while DeFi protocols including AAVE and Lido upgraded their oracle and cross-chain infrastructure to support institutional-grade use cases.

Chainlink said the expansion of CCIP to non-EVM blockchains, including Solana, unlocked access to tens of billions of dollars in assets across multiple ecosystems.

Infrastructure Push Sets Stage for 2026

Beyond adoption Chainlink said it also introduced new platform capabilities in 2025, including its Runtime Environment, Automated Compliance Engine and Confidential Compute service aimed at supporting privacy-preserving and compliant onchain applications.

The report concludes that 2025 marked a turning point for onchain finance, with 2026 expected to see tokenization adoption accelerate further as institutions standardize around shared infrastructure.

“Governments, financial institutions, and market infrastructures are increasingly aligning around Chainlink standards,” the company said, positioning its network as Core plumbing for the global shift toward onchain capital markets.