Chainlink, the industry-standard oracle platform, announced today the launch of the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), the all-in-one orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts—smart contracts that are easily 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.
In 2015, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) revolutionized blockchains by introducing a programmable execution environment that enabled developers to write their own smart contracts on a single chain, transforming our industry from a few billion dollars to several trillion today. The launch of CRE today marks the start of a new era in smart contract software development—the next major technological leap needed to bring the global financial system onchain at scale and propel our industry from a few trillion dollars in value to hundreds of trillions.
From stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets to Delivery vs. Payment (DvP) settlement and onchain data distribution, a wide variety of more advanced onchain finance use cases are already being built and deployed on CRE today by leading institutions, Web2 enterprises, and Web3 protocols, including:
As institutions increasingly adopt blockchains for the tokenization of RWAs, they require institutional-grade smart contracts that go above and beyond what blockchain execution environments alone can provide. What started as simple smart contracts on a single blockchain has now evolved into complex systems requiring orchestration across multiple blockchains and existing systems. In order to service these new institutional-grade smart contracts being developed by both TradFi and DeFi, they now require built-in data, cross-chain interoperability, compliance, privacy, and connectivity.
To manage this growing complexity, the foundation of smart contract development must evolve to keep development easy, intuitive, and integrated with the systems that run modern markets and institutions. It’s simply not scalable for institutions to replace their existing infrastructure that’s proven to secure hundreds of trillions in value with multiple different bespoke integrations and third-party vendors to power all of their blockchain use cases. What the industry needs to scale is an all-in-one orchestration layer that simplifies the launch and operation of institutional-grade smart contracts. That’s exactly what CRE is built to provide.
CRE enables the creation and execution of end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts across any chain, system, and data, along with having built compliance, privacy, and security. The result: the time-to-market for launching onchain finance use cases decreases from months to days, operational risks and development costs are reduced, and blockchain complexities like transaction management and gas tokens are fully abstracted away.
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