Chainlink Is the “Connective Tissue” Powering Wall Street’s Blockchain Future

Investment firm Grayscale says Chainlink will be at the center of the next stage of blockchain adoption, describing the protocol as “critical connective tissue” between crypto markets and traditional finance.

According to the report, Grayscale highlighted Chainlink’s evolution beyond price oracles into a broader stack that includes real-world data feeds, compliance-oriented tools for institutions, and cross-chain messaging. 

Chainlink is the critical connective tissue between crypto and traditional finance. It can already be considered essential infrastructure in blockchain-based finance, in our view, and it’s difficult to imagine how crypto can go mainstream without applying Chainlink’s suite of software technologies. 

Grayscale

Its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is cited as a notable example, enabling token and data transfers across blockchains and underpinning a CRE case study with JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform and Ondo Finance, as reported by Crypto News Australia in May.

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Chainlink at the Center of Tokenised RWAs

The report talks about how most financial instruments are still maintained off-chain, but that’s where Chainlink’s value shows up the most: through tokenisation. But to gain the benefits of blockchain settlement, Grayscale says these assets must be issued as tokens, attested, and continuously linked to reliable external data, a process it expects Chainlink to help coordinate.

The total RWA on-chain value has expanded from around US$5 billion (AU$7.5 billion) in early 2023 to over US$35.6 billion (AU$53.4 billion), according to RWA.xyz data, most of it being private credit.

Grayscale argued that this market could be increasingly reliant on Chainlink-powered infrastructure as it scales, pointing to Chainlink’s partnerships with data and index providers like FTSE Russell as an early indication of that role.

The research comes as Grayscale seeks SEC approval to convert its existing US$29 million (AU$43.5 million) Chainlink Trust into a spot Chainlink ETF, which would trade on NYSE Arca under the ticker GLNK. This would also be one of the first crypto ETFs to incorporate staking.

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