Chainlink Launches 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, Unlocking $80 Trillion Stock Market on Blockchain

Chainlink has introduced its new 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, a groundbreaking feature that provides access to market data for U.S. equities and ETFs continuously, five days a week. This development enables decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to utilize U.S. stock market data beyond traditional trading hours, significantly enhancing trading capabilities and market efficiency.

Key Takeaways

Chainlink has launched 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, offering continuous access to market data.
The new streams are available on over 40 blockchains and are already being utilized by several protocols.
The service delivers essential data points, such as bid and ask prices, helping to optimize trading strategies in DeFi.
The product addresses critical issues in fragmented equity market data, allowing for improved reliability and execution.

Chainlink Revolutionizes Access to U.S. Equity Market Data

Chainlink, a prominent oracle platform, has expanded its offerings by launching the innovative 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams. This new service provides continuous market data for U.S. equities and ETFs, operating 24 hours a day, five days a week.

According to the announcement, the Data Streams feature is compatible with more than 40 blockchains. It empowers protocols to construct on-chain equity markets without being constrained by standard U.S. trading hours, allowing for the development of perpetual contracts and prediction markets among other applications.

Several notable protocols, including Lighter, BitMEX, ApeX, HelloTrade, Decibel, Monaco, Opinion Labs, and Orderly, have already begun utilizing Chainlink's 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams.

Chainlink has designed the 24/5 Streams based on its established Chainlink Data Standard, which has facilitated transaction values exceeding $27 trillion and provided over 19 billion verified messages on-chain. Furthermore, it has secured approximately 70% of oracle-related DeFi transactions.

This new offering encompasses various data points, including bid and ask prices, bid and ask volumes, mid prices, last traded prices, staleness indicators, and market status flags.

The Chainlink team asserts, "For the first time, DeFi has secure access to U.S. equity market data that also includes after-hours and overnight sessions, unlocking the ~$80 trillion U.S. stock market on-chain."

Addressing Key Market Challenges

The 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams address several significant challenges in the market, according to the creators.

Firstly, the provision of reliable sub-second pricing—available 24 hours a day—eliminates pricing gaps, blind spots during off-hours, and the risk of outdated reference prices.

Beyond price data, the 24/5 Streams provide comprehensive asset data for financial applications, promising a "more complete picture of market conditions." This data allows for "smarter pricing logic, enhanced risk management, and quicker execution for on-chain protocols," Chainlink explains.

Enhancing On-Chain Trading with Continuous Data Streams

Chainlink emphasizes that its new 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams come with broadened coverage and improved data schemas, enabling various on-chain use cases.

Traders can engage with stocks and ETFs on-chain all day for most of the week, whether for trading, lending, or other applications.

The product also supplies builders with risk controls, safer execution, and advanced logic, all made possible through comprehensive market data.

Potential use cases include:

Developing perpetuals and derivatives around the clock
Creating prediction markets for accurate outcomes
Synthesizing equities and ETFs
Facilitating lending markets with dynamic margining, collateral valuation, and risk management
Enabling structured products and vaults with new yield and exposure strategies linked to U.S. equities

The press release highlighted critical issues the new product intends to address. While real-world assets (RWAs) are rapidly being adopted on-chain, U.S. equities are still "significantly underrepresented," despite being one of the largest and most liquid asset classes globally.

The Chainlink team attributes this gap to structural issues. While blockchain-based trading occurs continuously, U.S. equity markets operate during fragmented sessions within defined market hours.

Additionally, most on-chain data solutions typically provide just one price point for equities during standard trading hours. This results in two interconnected problems:

A disparity where on-chain markets cannot reliably mimic market conditions 24/7
Pricing blind spots, heightened risks during off-hours, and challenges in developing secure, scalable equity-based financial products on-chain.

Chainlink's 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams address these issues effectively by converting fragmented U.S. equity market data into continuous, cryptographically signed Data Streams. This solution ensures that traditional markets can function efficiently on-chain.