About

Chainlink is an oracle platform bringing the capital markets onchain and powering DeFi. The Chainlink stack provides the data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards needed to power blockchain use cases for institutional tokenized assets, lending, payments, stablecoins, and more.

Partners include Swift, Euroclear, Mastercard, Fidelity International, UBS, ANZ, and top protocols such as Aave, GMX, Lido. Chainlink leverages a fee model where offchain and onchain revenue from enterprise adoption is converted to LINK tokens and stored in a strategic Chainlink Reserve.

History

The Chainlink protocol was created in September 2017 by Chainlink Labs (formerly known as SmartContract), which itself was founded in 2014 by Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis. Chainlink was created to address the “oracle problem,” which refers to introducing offchain data to the blockchain in a secure way without relying on a centralized entity.

Chainlink went live on Ethereum in May 2019. At launch, it only supported a singular ETH/USD price feed on Ethereum. In the subsequent months and years, coverage expanded to additional price feeds across several blockchains. In 2020, new product offerings, such as VRFs and Proof of Reserves, were introduced.

Notable milestones in the project’s development include:

• April 2021 - The Chainlink 2.0 Whitepaper was released, outlining a new vision for Chainlink, including the Decentralized Oracle Network (DON), Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), and a new economic model centered around LINK token staking.
• August 2021 - Chainlink’s Automation product went live on Ethereum following a successful beta event.
• September 2022 - Chainlink introduced the Chainlink BUILD and SCALE programs and a staking roadmap for the LINK Economics 2.0 model. Chainlink BUILD aims to bolster early-stage start-ups and protocols with Chainlink services, infrastructure, and support in return for a portion of a project’s token supply. Chainlink SCALE aims to have blockchain networks subsidize the costs of Chainlink nodes.
• December 2022 - Chainlink released Staking v0.1, the first iteration of staking that enabled community members of the Early Access Eligibility List to stake up to 7,000.00 LINK towards ETH-USD price feeds on Ethereum. From Nov. 28, 2023, to Dec. 11, 2023, the Chainlink Staking v0.2 program launched in phases, with initial access granted to Staking v0.1 program participants and other eligible) users. As of May 2024, the Staking v0.2 pool has been filled and no longer accepts deposits.
• July 2023 - Chainlink’s CCIP officially launched on mainnet across Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism, and Polygon with support for derivatives and lending protocols. As of May 2024, CCIP supports nine networks.
• October 2023 - Data Streams launched on Arbitrum mainnet with early access support for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.
• January 2024 - Uma, in collaboration with Flashbot, unveiled the Oracle Value Aggregation Layer (Oval) on Ethereum mainnet. Oval is an MEV capture mechanism that enables protocols to monetize the value produced when consuming Chainlink Oracle data.
• April 2024 - Chainlink launched Transporter, a cross-chain bridging app powered by CCIP, allowing users to bridge supported assets like ETH, USDC, and LINK across eight supported networks.

As of May 2024, Chainlink has deployed beta mainnet versions of the “Functions” product on Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Ethereum, and Base. Additionally, Chainlink continues to release incremental upgrades across all products. The most recent release was Chainlink VRF 2.5, made available on April 29, 2024. All past and upcoming upgrades can be followed on Messari Intel.

Furthermore, Chainlink has introduced two proposed solutions that are still under development: (i) Chainlink DECO, a privacy-enhancing protocol acquired from Cornell University in August 2020, and (ii) Fair Sequencing Services (FSS). DECO will employ zero-knowledge proofs in enabling data provenance for a specific data source or arbitrary statements on the computed data. On the other hand, FSS is a transaction ordering solution designed to mitigate harmful forms of maximal extractable value (MEV), enabling fairer decentralized systems. Based on a commercially reasonable search, the project team has yet to publish a definite release date for either of the solutions.

In August 2025 the Chainlink Reserve was introduced - a smart contract that acts as an extension of Payment Abstraction to convert offchain and onchain revenue into LINK.

At the same time, Bitwise filed an S‑1 statement with the U.S. SEC for the Bitwise Chainlink ETF, followed by Grayscale and it's GLNK ETF.

In October 2025, Chainlink introduced DataLink - a data publishing service designed to enable institutions to make market data available on blockchains.