Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) aims to serve as the all-in-one orchestration layer tapping into institutional-grade smart contracts for onchain finance. Before the launch of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), smart contract development was said to be quite complex due to the fairly limited programmability of blockchains.
As noted in a blog post by the team at Chainlink, the EVM (starting in 2015) had transformed blockchains by rolling out a programmable execution environment intended for for smart contract code on a single blockchain.
This simplified smart contract development by enabling devs to write their own smart contracts on “a single chain, using only the data and tokens within that chain.”
It was said to be a key moment that introduced single chain tokenization, onchain trading, onchain voting, as well as various other types of smart contracts, transforming the industry “from a few billion dollars to several trillion today.”
Chainlink further noted in their blog post that since then, smart contracts have actually increased in overall complexity as well as scope in what they are required to do, now “requiring infrastructure that connects the offchain world with the onchain world, which the EVM and blockchain execution environments in general are not able to solve.”
This challenge is known as “the oracle problem”, and the Chainlink community is widely credited for addressing it.
The oracle problem of needing to connect to external systems is becoming greater with institutional adoption, as institutional use cases require access to external data, “cross-chain interoperability, and identity and compliance solutions to go live, as well as connectivity to existing systems for accounting and management of value—ranging from banking infrastructure to payment networks such as Swift.”
Until now, there has not been a “single, secure, and efficient way to meet the requirements of institutions and manage all this complexity without relying on a list of individual integrations.”
The launch of CRE marks the beginning of a new era in smart contract software development.
CRE offers an all-in-one orchestration layer for building institutional-grade smart contracts—smart contracts that are “connected to external data, cross-chain enabled, compliance-ready, and privacy-preserving, which are able to securely interoperate across thousands of public and private blockchains, existing identity systems, and core financial infrastructure.”
This is the next technological milestone required to bring the global financial system onchain at scale and propel the industry from “a few trillion dollars in value to hundreds of trillions.”
From stablecoins and tokenized RWAs to Delivery vs. Payment settlement and onchain data distribution, a range of onchain finance use cases are being built and deployed on CRE by institutions, Web2 enterprises, and Web3 protocols, such as the following:
- Kinexys by J.P. Morgan and Ondo used CRE to conduct a first-of-its-kind cross-chain DvP transaction between public and private blockchains.
- Swift, Euroclear, and 22 leading financial market participants are part of an industry initiative using CRE to streamline corporate actions processing.
- UBS Tokenize and DigiFT completed the first-ever redemption of a tokenized fund using the Chainlink Digital Transfer Agency (DTA) technical standard powered by CRE.
- Swift and UBS are leveraging CRE to manage tokenized fund workflows using the existing ISO 20022 messaging standard.
- Mastercard and Swapper co-developed a payments solution on CRE that enables Mastercard’s 3.5 billion credit card holders to purchase crypto assets on decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap.
- Westpac Institutional Bank and Imperium Markets are implementing CRE in Project Acacia, a new joint initiative between the Reserve Bank of Australia and Digital Finance CRC (DFCRC), to orchestrate DvP settlement of tokenized assets.
- Banco Inter, Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Central Bank of Brazil (Banco Central do Brasil), Standard Chartered, and additional partners launched a blockchain-powered trade finance platform that leverages CRE to securely automate settlement of cross-border agricultural trade.
- Coinbase’s x402 standard is enabling AI agents to pay for CRE workflows.
- Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are collaborating with Chainlink to showcase how CRE can connect to Web2 systems.
- Balcony, the platform for real estate tokenization backed by government-sourced data, is adopting CRE to power $240+ billion in property assets onchain.
- 21X, the EU-regulated onchain exchange for tokenized securities, adopted CRE in production to power its exchange with verifiable post-trade data, including last traded prices and bid-ask offers, for securities listed on the 21X platform.
- Horizon, Aave Lab’s institutional initiative built on Aave infrastructure that enables tokenized assets to be used as collateral to borrow stablecoins, is adopting the Chainlink ACE, powered by CRE, to enable compliance policies that govern how regulated capital is deployed in lending markets.
- Kiln, an enterprise-grade staking platform with over $16 billion under management, built an entire new DeFi product called Railnet on CRE, which empowers users to manage liquidity across omni-vaults through programmatic yield strategies.
- Crypto Finance by Deutsche Börse Group leveraged CRE to orchestrate a Proof of Reserve feed for onchain verification of assets held in custody by Crypto Finance, supporting its physically backed Ethereum and Bitcoin ETPs.