Journalist
Sead Fadilpašić
Journalist
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Major oracle platform Chainlink has expanded its Data Streams with the launch of the novel 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, providing market data for U.S. equities and ETFs across trading sessions 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Per the announcement, Data Streams is available on more than 40 blockchains. It allows protocols to build onchain equity markets that are not limited to standard U.S. trading hours. They can build equity perps and prediction markets, among others.
Moreover, a number of protocols already utilise the Chainlink 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams. These include Lighter, BitMEX, ApeX, HelloTrade, Decibel, Monaco, Opinion Labs, and Orderly.
Chainlink states that they built the 24/5 Streams on their Chainlink Data Standard. The latter has so far enabled over $27 trillion in transaction value and delivered over 19 billion total verified messages onchain. It also claims to have secured some 70% of oracle-related DeFi.
Additionally, the new offer includes bid and ask price, bid and ask volume, mid price, last traded price, staleness indicator, and market status flags.
Per the team, “For the first time, DeFi has secure access to U.S. equity market data that also includes after-hours and overnight sessions, unlocking the ~$80T U.S. stock market onchain.”
Moreover, 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams resolve several significant issues, its creators say.
Primarily, reliable sub-second pricing – available 24 hours a day across regular, pre-market, post-market, and overnight sessions – removes pricing gaps, blind spots during off-hours, and the risk of stale reference prices.
Beyond data price, 24/5 Streams offers asset data for financial applications for “a more complete picture of market conditions.” The data enables “smarter pricing logic, enhanced risk management, and faster execution for onchain protocols,” Chainlink says.
Transforming Fragmented Equity Market Data Into Continuous Streams
According to Chainlink, 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams come with expanded coverage and enhanced data schemas, enabling a variety of onchain use cases.
Traders can work with stocks and ETFs onchain all day for most of the week, be it for trading, lending, or another purpose.
Also, the product provides builders with risk controls, safer execution, and advanced logic, all via market data.
Use cases include:
- building perpetuals and derivatives 24 hours a day;
- creating prediction markets for accurate resolution;
- creating synthetic equities and ETFs;
- operating lending markets: dynamic margining, collateral valuation, and risk management;
- enabling structured products and vaults: new yield and exposure strategies tied to U.S. equities.
Meanwhile, the press release went into the key issue the novel product aims to resolve. It explains that, while real-world assets (RWAs) are seeing fast onchain adoption, U.S. equities remain “significantly underrepresented.” And yet, the latter is one of the world’s largest and most liquid asset classes, the team argue.
The reason is structural, they explain. Blockchain-enabled trading operates nonstop. However, U.S. equity markets trade across fragmented sessions during dedicated market hours.
Also, most onchain data solutions provide only one price point for equities during standard trading hours. This creates two interrelated issues:
- a gap where onchain markets are unable to reliably replicate market conditions all 24 hours of the day:
- pricing blind spots, increased risk during off-hours, and difficulty building secure, scalable equity-based financial products onchain.
Chainlink 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams solves this “by transforming fragmented U.S. equity market data into continuous, cryptographically signed Data Streams,” the announcement says. “As a result, traditional markets can properly operate onchain.”
