The US stock market worth $80 trillion is now directly on the blockchain!‌🔥

In the integration of blockchain and traditional finance, timing mismatch or temporal inconsistency has long been a silent risk factor. Chainlink's recent "24/5 US Equities Streams" update is an infrastructural milestone in reducing this risk. Let's take a technical look at what exactly Chainlink is or what Chainlink's role is!

Chainlink primarily acts as a decentralized middleware or oracle. Its job is to accurately bring data from the off-chain world—such as the huge volume of data generated by the US equity or stock market, which is constantly produced on traditional exchanges—onto on-chain smart contracts. When a DeFi protocol offers tokenized stocks, for example, (say, you are buying Tesla shares on-chain with crypto), the smart contract of that protocol needs to know the real-time price of Tesla in the off-chain market. Chainlink aggregates, verifies, and feeds this price data from various premium data sources to the blockchain. In other words, Chainlink is the only trusted data bridge between the traditional capital markets and the digital asset economy.

Until now, smart contracts or on-chain applications received US equity price feeds—such as Apple, Tesla, or various ETFs—mainly during standard market hours, i.e., from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM New York time. The problem was right after that. After the market closed at 4 PM, on-chain oracles would hold the last closing price. But in reality, off-chain markets continue trading after hours and pre-market. If a company's earnings report turns out to be poor after market close, or if geopolitical reasons cause a significant drop in a stock's price, the smart contract wouldn't know until the next day before 9:30 AM. This long gap meant that on-chain protocols were essentially blind or in the dark, creating a severe gap risk for lending protocols or synthetic assets.

With Chainlink's new update, this scenario is completely changing. From now on, developers will be able to access US stock market price data in real-time, 24/7, five days a week through premium data streams on-chain. That means smart contracts no longer have to wait for the exchange to open. If there is volatility in a stock's price during pre-market or after-hours sessions, on-chain protocols will receive that data within milliseconds and can take necessary actions such as (liquidation or margin calls).

The impact is far-reaching. First, it will restore trust in tokenized real-world asset sectors. When large institutions see that the valuation of their assets is happening in real-time on-chain just like in off-chain markets, they will be more inclined to provide liquidity. Second, it will enable the creation of hybrid DeFi products that were previously only possible in traditional finance, such as intraday derivatives or automated hedging strategies that can respond to global events in real-time.

In simple terms, US equities or stocks are assets, and Chainlink is the infrastructure that makes these assets usable within the digital economy. The financial world gradually shifting on-chain is evidenced by Chainlink's transformation.