Chainlink (LINK): the oracle network, its bank pilots and what holders control

The Chainlink crypto project now runs two businesses under one token. One is the price-feed service that DeFi lenders and derivatives protocols have read since May 2019. The other is a platform for banks and market infrastructures, built on a workflow engine called CRE and the CCIP cross-chain protocol, which DTCC, Swift, UBS and SIX have tested or put to work. As of 17 October 2026, only part of that second business runs in production; the rest is pilots and go-live dates still ahead.

LINK has a fixed supply of 1 billion. It pays for services, backs a staking pool and fills the Chainlink Reserve, whose main Ethereum contract held 6,293,843 LINK at 19:37 UTC on 17 October 2026. It gives holders no vote.

What a blockchain oracle does, and the basics of the token, are on our Chainlink (LINK) coin page. Here the subject is the organisation: who runs it, how it earns money, which bank projects are live, who audited the code and when its feeds went wrong.

Chainlink crypto: who runs the network and who owns what

Sergey Nazarov and Steve Ellis founded SmartContract.com in 2014. The company, now Chainlink Labs, has Nazarov as chief executive and Ellis as chief technology officer. Their first whitepaper, dated 4 September 2017, had a third author: Ari Juels, a computer science professor at Cornell Tech who became Chainlink Labs’ chief scientist.

The token sale followed that month. According to the annual report of the Grayscale Chainlink Trust filed with the SEC, 350 million LINK, 35% of the supply, went to buyers for $32 million. The filing gives no day. We found no equity round for Chainlink Labs in any primary source, and the funding figures on data aggregators contradict each other.

The network went live on Ethereum in May 2019 with a single ETH/USD price feed, the same filing says. In August 2020 Chainlink bought DECO, a Cornell protocol for proving facts about web sessions without revealing the underlying data. A second whitepaper, Chainlink 2.0, dated 15 April 2021, described oracle networks that compute as well as deliver data.

LINK holders do not vote

There is no DAO and no on-chain vote. The Grayscale filing contrasts LINK with tokens whose holders govern their network and says ownership of LINK “confers no such rights”. It adds that the company and core developers can access and alter the network’s source code, and that upgrades go through a Contract-Upgrade Service controlled by the company. Applications that buy oracle services choose whether to move to the upgraded contracts.

A separate body, the Chainlink Foundation, supports the project and, per the same filing, manages the Chainlink Reserve and its buybacks. For a LINK holder, the practical result is that the token’s course depends on decisions by a private company and a foundation, with no ballot to change them.

The management bench has grown on the institutional side. Uri Sarid, chief architect, is quoted in the October 2024 post that introduced CRE. On 4 June 2026 Chainlink Labs hired Andrew McCormick, previously head of eToro US, as head of institutional and market development. Announcing the move, he said banks and asset managers were “going all in on the financial megatrend”.

How Chainlink makes money, and what the Chainlink Reserve holds

Some fees are paid on-chain by protocols and users. DefiLlama, which counts only those, recorded $5.54 million over the 30 days to 17 October 2026 and $78.4 million since it began tracking. Chainlink told The Block in August 2025 that it had earned hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly from enterprises paying off-chain. No audited figure has been published.

Payment Abstraction lets clients pay in stablecoins or gas tokens, which are swapped into LINK. The proceeds go to the Chainlink Reserve, announced on 7 August 2025 with a little over $1 million of LINK already inside. Half of the fees from staking-secured Smart Value Recapture services are also meant to fund it. The Reserve is an Ethereum contract (0x9A709B7B69EA42D5eeb1ceBC48674C69E1569eC6) with a multi-day timelock on withdrawals, and Chainlink said it expected none “for multiple years”.

The balance has risen at every reading. Chainlink’s Q2 2026 review gave 4.5 million LINK at the end of June, after 1.44 million were added in the quarter. Our own reading of the contract showed 5,673,707 LINK on 27 August and 6,293,843 LINK at 19:37 UTC on 17 October, about 0.63% of the maximum supply. That is roughly 12,000 LINK a day over seven weeks. These counts cover the main contract only: Chainlink’s Reserve dashboard gave us no figure.

Does the buying move the token? Not much, according to Sam Daodu, who wrote for 24/7 Wall St on 17 October 2026 that the Reserve lacks the strength to lift LINK’s price significantly. The purchases are real and public. Against 766 million LINK in circulation, they are small.

Chainlink tokenomics: 1 billion LINK split 35/35/30

No more LINK can be created: the token contract and Chainlink’s supply API both show exactly 1,000,000,000. At genesis, 35% went to the 2017 sale, 35% to a pool for node operators and ecosystem rewards, and 30% to the company, according to the Grayscale filing.

On 17 October 2026, Chainlink’s supply API counted 766.85 million LINK in circulation. The other 233 million or so sit in 33 Ethereum addresses that Chainlink lists on its circulating-supply page under “legacy” and “new” headings, without saying who controls each one. The same page states a release schedule of 7% of total supply per year, but no calendar per wallet and no history of past sales. Holders who want to follow supply have to watch the addresses themselves.

Two US exchange-traded funds hold LINK. Grayscale’s GLNK began trading on NYSE Arca on 2 December 2025; its trust held 6,029,727 LINK at the end of that year, about 0.9% of circulating supply at the time. Bitwise’s CLNK followed on 14 January 2026, with a 0.34% annual fee and Coinbase Custody holding the tokens, according to the fund’s SEC filings.

Chainlink products in 2026, from price feeds to CRE

The product list now reaches far past the original feeds. Where a primary source gives a dated milestone, the table shows it; a blank date means we could not confirm one.

Service	What it does	Dated milestone
Data Feeds	Price feeds pushed on-chain, read by lending and derivatives protocols	Mainnet with one ETH/USD feed, May 2019
Data Streams	Low-latency data that applications pull when they need it, for trading	Live on Base 15 August 2024, on Stellar 14 October 2026
DataLink	Lets exchanges and data firms publish their own data on-chain	SIX Swiss and Spanish equities data, April 2026
CCIP	Messages and token transfers between blockchains	Open to all developers 24 April 2024; version 2.0 on 28 September 2026
CRE (Chainlink Runtime Environment)	Workflow engine linking data, chains and bank systems	Announced 30 October 2024
Proof of Reserve	On-chain checks of the assets backing a token	Used by Wenia’s COPW stablecoin (Bancolombia group)
ACE (Automated Compliance Engine)	Applies compliance rules to transactions	More than 20 providers in CCIP 2.0
SVR (Smart Value Recapture)	Returns part of liquidation profits to protocols	Over $23 million recaptured by Q2 2026
Fulcrum	Repo and collateral management across chains	Introduced 30 September 2026

The older developer tools remain. Automation triggers contract functions when set conditions are met, Functions lets contracts call web services, and VRF supplies verifiable random numbers for games and lotteries. VRF reached Base together with Data Streams in August 2024.

CRE sits at the centre of the pitch to banks. One CRE workflow can read data, check compliance rules, call a bank’s internal systems and settle on one or several chains, with Chainlink nodes running each step. In the second quarter of 2026 it went live on nine more mainnets, among them Linea, Mantle, Scroll, Celo and Sonic, according to the quarterly review.

SVR deals with a DeFi-specific leak. When a price update makes a loan eligible for liquidation, bots race to close it, and the lending protocol loses the profit they take. SVR captures part of that. Chainlink reported more than $23 million recaptured by the end of June 2026, about $15 million for DeFi protocols and about $8 million for the Chainlink network, across over $880 million of liquidations.

Proof of Reserve has a short but concrete client list. Wenia, the digital asset arm of Colombia’s Bancolombia group, uses it to show the peso reserves behind its COPW stablecoin, with the check built into minting.

What is Chainlink CCIP, and what CCIP 2.0 changed

CCIP, the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, moves messages and tokens between blockchains. It opened to any developer on 24 April 2024 on nine chains: Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Kroma, Optimism, Polygon and WEMIX. Issuers that adopt its Cross-Chain Token standard can run one asset on many networks while keeping supply consistent.

CCIP 2.0 went live on 28 September 2026. Its main change lets an institution run its own verification step, a Cross-Chain Verifier, whose checks are added to those of Chainlink’s default committee of 16 node operators. Version 2.0 also brings compliance checks through ACE, finality settings chosen by each application and an open marketplace for verifiers; support for Ethereum’s Fast Confirmation Rule is tied to that rule’s own launch. Chainlink markets CCIP as the only interoperability standard designed for the largest financial institutions.

The CCIP migration after the KelpDAO exploit

Much of CCIP’s 2026 growth followed the 18 April exploit of a KelpDAO route on LayerZero, which drained 116,500 rsETH, about $292 million, as our LayerZero profile and account of the Kelp hack details. From May, token issuers began to switch. By Chainlink’s count, more than $15 billion of token value moved or committed to move to CCIP within four months, led by BitGo (over $7.7 billion), Mantle (over $2.5 billion), KelpDAO itself (over $1.5 billion), Lombard (over $1 billion) and Kraken (over $330 million).

Chainlink reported $4.90 billion of CCIP volume in the second quarter of 2026, up 353% on a year earlier. On 28 September it put total cross-chain token value above $84 billion. That measures tokens set up to move over CCIP, not money held in it. DefiLlama, which tracks value locked in CCIP contracts, showed about $1.92 billion on 17 October 2026.

On 8 October 2026 Chainlink released Vault Adapters, which let a standard ERC-4626 vault take deposits from more than 80 chains; Aave, Lombard, Venus and Re are named as adopters. Lido has used CCIP since 29 October 2024 to accept ETH for staking directly from Arbitrum, Base and Optimism, and its blog added Linea on 22 October 2025 (the staking side is on our Lido project page).

Stellar is the newest chain on the list. Data Feeds and Data Streams went live on Stellar mainnet on 14 October 2026, with the Stellar Development Foundation paying oracle costs through SCALE, a programme started on 28 September 2022 under which a chain covers Chainlink’s operating costs for a period. Stellar’s plan also includes CCIP, which had not been reported live by 17 October 2026.

Chainlink, DTCC and Swift: what is live and what is still a pilot

Chainlink announces bank work often, and the announcements are of different kinds. Some describe systems in production, others tests that ended with a report, and a few describe go-lives still to come. As of 17 October 2026 they sort as follows.

Stage	Project	Date
In production	UBS and DigiFT tokenised-fund workflow on the DTA standard, described by UBS as a first in production	4 November 2025
In production	SIX publishes data on Swiss and Spanish equities on-chain through DataLink	April 2026
In production (role per Chainlink)	DTCC production trades with tokenised DTC-held assets on Besu and Canton, with more than 30 firms	15 July 2026
Pilot	Swift interoperability experiments with more than 12 institutions, including Euroclear, Clearstream, Citi and BNY Mellon	Report, August 2023
Pilot	Swift, UBS Asset Management and Chainlink tokenised-fund settlement under MAS Project Guardian	5 November 2024
Pilot	ANZ and ADDX cross-chain tokenised commercial paper with privacy features	November 2024
Pilot	HKMA e-HKD phase 2: ANZ, China AMC and Fidelity International settle across chains with CCIP and ACE	Report, October 2025
Trial	Corporate actions phase 2 with 24 institutions, including Swift, DTCC, Euroclear and UBS	29 September 2025
Introduced, no named client	Fulcrum repo and collateral product	30 September 2026
Expected	DTCC Collateral AppChain built on CRE	Go-live expected Q4 2026

The DTCC rows show why the sorting matters. DTCC’s release on its July production trades lists Chainlink among more than 30 participants without saying what it did; the claim that CRE orchestrated the flow is Chainlink’s. The collateral project is clearer. On 12 May 2026 DTCC said its Collateral AppChain would use CRE and Chainlink’s data standard. Nadine Chakar, its global head of digital assets, said “our goal is to enable 24/7, near real-time collateral management across global markets and blockchains”. Go-live is expected in the fourth quarter, and DTCC has given October 2026 as the launch month of its separate Tokenization Service.

The corporate actions trial deals with events such as dividends and stock splits, still announced largely in unstructured text. In the 2025 phase, AI models turned those announcements into structured data and CRE validated the output before it was sent on to participants.

At Sibos, the Swift banking conference, from 28 to 30 September 2026, Chainlink presented access to Swift’s ledger for Swift-community banks through CRE, with each bank keeping its own signing keys; the recap gives no go-live date. DTCC and Chainlink ran an on-stage demo of a cross-chain securities financing trade using Fulcrum. Chainlink also signed a partnership with Bottomline, whose Global Pay Connect platform is used by more than 600 banks by Bottomline’s count, to link ISO 20022 payment messages to on-chain settlement. A Chainlink entry, an automated cash dividend paid across four blockchains, was runner-up in Swift’s 2026 Business Challenge.

Fulcrum, introduced on the last day of Sibos, handles repo and collateral moves across chains. CRE runs the workflow, CCIP moves the assets and Data Streams supply valuations and haircuts. Chainlink stresses that Fulcrum “does not custody assets, act as a counterparty, or operate a trading venue”. It says integration with traditional finance platforms is under way but has named no client using it live.

Chainlink staking: pool size, rates and exit rules

Staking has had two versions. Version 0.1 opened in early access on 6 December 2022, with a 25 million LINK cap and no slashing for community stakers. Version 0.2 replaced it: priority migration began on 28 November 2023, early access on 7 December and general access on 11 December. The Block reported more than 11 million LINK staked in the first half hour of early access.

The v0.2 pool holds up to 45 million LINK: 40.875 million for the community, at 1 to 15,000 LINK per address, and 4.125 million for node operators, at 1,000 to 75,000 each. At launch the community base rate was 4.5% a year, or 4.32% after 4% of rewards went to node operators, with a 90-day ramp-up.

Exiting takes 28 days of unbonding, then a 7-day window to withdraw. Only node operators staking on the ETH/USD feed on Ethereum can be slashed, by 700 LINK per valid alert, and a valid alert pays the alerter 7,000 LINK. Chainlink has published no current total staked and has announced no successor to v0.2.

Is Chainlink audited? Reports, bug bounty and incidents

Chainlink’s security page mentions regular audits but names no firm. The public reports we found are in the auditors’ own repositories. Sigma Prime reviewed the original contracts in December 2018, the ConversionRate aggregator in May 2019 and, in June 2025, a token migrator for a Chainlink migration lockbox. Trail of Bits reviewed Custom Senders and Receivers, contracts that let users on optimistic rollups stake into Ethereum protocols such as Lido through a liquidity pool. That review ran in August 2024; the published report, with a follow-up review dated 25 February 2025, lists seven findings.

Two Code4rena contests covered Chainlink code: staking v0.2 from 25 August to 12 September 2023, with a 250,000 USDC prize pool, and an unspecified Chainlink codebase from 1 to 25 November 2024, with 235,000 USDC. We found no published audit of CCIP 2.0 by a named firm. A February 2026 Trail of Bits report covers a LlamaRisk product built on CRE; it reviews that product, not CRE.

Since 11 May 2021 a bug bounty on Immunefi has offered up to $3 million for critical smart-contract bugs, with identity checks before payment. Chainlink also runs a programme on HackerOne. Its documentation tells integrators they stay responsible for reviewing their own use of CCIP.

Two disputed price episodes

No exploit of Chainlink’s own core contracts appears in the sources we checked. The trouble has come from feeds and from how protocols wire them. On 29 May 2025 a Chainlink feed for Elixir’s deUSD, used by Euler Finance on Avalanche, showed $1.03 after trading in a thin Curve pool, and more than $500,000 of positions were liquidated, CryptoSlate reported. Omer Goldberg, founder of Chaos Labs, said a key update arrived 25 minutes late and criticised volume-weighted pricing on illiquid pools. Zack Rynes, Chainlink’s community liaison, answered that the feed captured the volume-weighted price accurately and that protocols must add their own checks.

In mid-February 2026 Moonwell, a lender on Base and Optimism, valued cbETH at about $1.12 instead of roughly $2,200. One feed, wired through a Chainlink OEV wrapper by governance proposal MIP-X43, used the raw cbETH/ETH rate, a number close to one, as if it were a dollar price. Liquidators took 1,096 cbETH, and Moonwell was left with about $1.78 million of bad debt. The fault was in the configuration, not in Chainlink’s nodes.

Chainlink vs Pyth and other oracle networks

Chainlink’s main rival for price data is Pyth Network, which takes prices straight from trading firms and exchanges and lets applications pull an update when they need one. RedStone and Chronicle chase the same clients. In cross-chain transfers, Chainlink competes with LayerZero and Wormhole.

Nobody independent measures who leads today. DefiLlama’s oracle dataset now sits behind a paid endpoint, and its free figures are incomplete. The last comparison we could source, by Cointelegraph on 30 October 2024, had Pyth ahead on 30-day volume and Chainlink ahead on value secured. Chainlink’s Q2 2026 review claims $110 billion of value secured, an undated figure from the company itself.

Chainlink dates to watch: Link:NYC and the DTCC go-live

Link:NYC, Chainlink’s event for banks and asset managers, takes place in New York on 29 October 2026; venue and speakers had not been published by 17 October. DTCC expects its Collateral AppChain on CRE to go live before the end of the year. On-chain, the numbers to follow are CCIP’s arrival on Stellar, further issuer moves to CCIP and the Reserve’s daily purchases, visible on the Ethereum contract.