Chainlink Privacy Breakthrough, SWIFT Tie-Up Set Stage for Institutional Tokenisation

The economics are compelling: instant settlement, automated servicing, real-time compliance, and shared collateral rails are rewriting how value can move. 

But if tokenisation is ready technically, institutions have not been able to fully step onchain. Not because blockchain tooling is immature, but because the infrastructure surrounding it remains incompatible with how global finance actually operates.  

Institutions’ tokenisation bottleneck 

Privacy isn’t a “nice-to-have” but a prerequisite for institutions. 

Capital markets, FX, private credit desks, and derivatives clearing houses rely on confidential order books and walled-off risk systems. Until now, almost none of that could migrate onchain without risking compliance breaches or exposing proprietary edge, since blockchain public ledgers reveal transaction logic by default. 

Moreover, financial institutions communicate through strict messaging standards, such as ISO 20022, MT, MX, and other tightly regulated formats, designed for auditability and interoperability. Connecting these legacy rails to smart contracts in a safe, auditable, and compliant manner has long proven to be the missing link that has kept tokenized assets from scaling beyond isolated pilots. 

Chainlink may finally be bringing these two worlds together. The introduction of Confidential Compute, complemented by Chainlink’s DECO-rooted privacy stack, resolves the confidentiality barrier by enabling private smart contracts that preserve institutional-grade confidentiality end-to-end. 

In practical terms, institutions can now choose which parts of a workflow must stay off-chain or encrypted, while still benefiting from programmable settlement and shared ledgers. 

In parallel, Chainlink’s work with SWIFT on ISO 20022-aligned interoperability closes the standards gap, allowing traditional financial messages to trigger onchain actions seamlessly across both public and private blockchains. 

What Chainlink’s Confidential Compute unlocks 

Chainlink's Confidential Compute essentially introduces a new execution primitive to the blockchain world: private smart contracts capable of running sensitive workflows without exposing their internal logic, inputs, or outputs. 

It is the privacy layer that capital markets require, but public blockchains have never natively provided. Institutions can now disclose only what regulators require, keeping the rest shielded from competitors and counterparties. 

This unlocks the ability to migrate entire categories of financial operations onchain, not just token movements, but the logic that governs them. Subscription and redemption rules for tokenized funds, NAV calculations, credit assessments, pricing functions, collateral waterfalls, and liquidity-management logic can all run inside encrypted enclaves.

Financial messages to onchain execution 

Just as critical as privacy is Chainlink’s alignment with ISO 20022, the emerging universal language of global financial communication. ISO 20022 is rapidly becoming the standard for payments, securities’ settlement and corporate instructions across the entire SWIFT network. Instead of forcing banks to design new blockchain-facing infrastructure, Chainlink enables these messages to be interpreted directly by smart contracts. 

Through the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) rolled out in early November, a single ISO 20022 instruction sent over SWIFT can automatically trigger the corresponding onchain action - minting or burning a tokenized fund unit, updating a corporate-action record, settling collateral movements, or coordinating cross-chain transfers. 

Crucially, the flow works both ways. Onchain state changes can be formatted back into ISO 20022 messages and routed into existing custody, fund administration, or settlement systems. Institutions can therefore continue to operate through the rails they already trust, while blockchain becomes an invisible extension of those workflows, rather than a separate operational stack. 

A core pillar of this “all-in-one orchestration layer” is Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), serving as the unified messaging and token-transfer layer across blockchains. CCIP allows institutions to move value and instructions with consistent security regardless of the underlying network. The adoption momentum is already measurable, as cumulative transfer value is on track to cross the $5bn threshold, +412% year to date. 

This capability arrives at a pivotal moment as SWIFT’s Standards Release is set to go live on 22 Nov, refreshing both legacy MT messages and the ISO 20022 formats with richer data fields, updated compliance logic, and modernized templates. 

The global messaging backbone, which processes over 53mn FIN messages per day and connects 11,500 institutions across 200 jurisdictions, is effectively being rewired right as Chainlink standardizes how those messages can trigger onchain execution. 

SWIFT’s existing partnership with Chainlink has been explicit, as the network formally describes Chainlink as the “industry-standard oracle platform” that links its ecosystem to both public and permissioned blockchains.  

Over the past year, SWIFT-led industry pilot programmes reflect a sustained push to incorporate Chainlink infrastructure into real tokenisation rails. Major institutions, such as Euroclear, Clearstream, Citi, or BNY Mellon, have already tested cross-chain movements of tokenized assets driven by ISO 20022 messages, which CRE now makes significantly easier to route and execute across private and public blockchains. 

For the first time, privacy, compliance, and messaging conventions are aligned with onchain execution, unlocking a viable path for real institutional adoption. Tokenized assets can be plugged directly into the same operational fabric that already handles trillions of securities and payments every day. 

Combined with private smart contract execution, it transforms tokenisation from a promising side experiment into a fully integrated institutional rail, powered by Chainlink. 

Chainlink’s strengthening fundamentals 

Chainlink stands as the only institutionally-compliant bridge and oracle framework ready to underpin the potential trillion-dollar wave of tokenized financial flows from traditional markets. 

For years, Chainlink has positioned itself as the backbone of decentralized finance (DeFi), powering data feeds and oracle networks that now cover nearly a 70% market share, according to DeFiLlama. When it comes to oracles, a key metric is Total Value Secured (TVS) - the total value of assets secured by Chainlink’s infrastructure across DeFi protocols’ smart contracts.  

After crossing the $100bn milestone in September, Chainlink’s TVS now sits at $77.4bn, according to DeFiLlama data, still making Chainlink the undisputed leader in the oracle sector with an eightfold lead over the second-largest competitor, Pyth Network. Total Value Secured (TVS) has grown 247% since 2024, as institutional adoption accelerates, accruing directly to the infrastructure value. 

A major TVS driver is AAVE, which alone represents roughly 70% of Chainlink’s secured value, reflecting the deep integration of Chainlink across money markets and lending protocols. 

In April 2025, Aave integrated Chainlink’s Sustainable Value Recovery (SVR) framework, unlocking a new revenue stream by enabling secure, oracle-driven liquidation auctions. SVR enhances the way collateral is unwound during liquidations, turning one of DeFi’s most critical and highest-value operations into an efficient, and revenue-generating process for both protocols. 

As it expands to other protocols, SVR could emerge as a new standard for liquidation infrastructure across DeFi, materially expanding Chainlink’s cash-flow base beyond its traditional oracle services. Since rolling out in late March, SVR-enabled liquidation auctions have generated an additional $2.48mn in revenue for Chainlink.  

Reserve as value capture 

Despite its role as critical infrastructure, LINK spent years without a direct mechanism linking network usage to token appreciation. Demand was mostly speculative, with little structural value captured. 

That changed this year. The launch of the Chainlink Reserve, built on top of Chainlink’s Payment Abstraction framework, finally closed the gap between protocol activity and token economics. Payment Abstraction enables a structural buying mechanism converting any revenue generated across the Chainlink ecosystem - whether paid in fiat, stablecoins, ETH or other assets – automatically into LINK. 

In practice, every Chainlink service used creates recurring, programmatic demand for LINK directly on the open market. This transforms Chainlink from a pure infrastructure provider into a yield-generating, value-accruing asset, where recurring buy-pressure supports price and amplifies LINK’s scarcity premium as institutional use cases scale.  

Since August, the Reserve has absorbed 803,364 LINK, worth about $11mn, and roughly 0.12% of the circulating supply in only three months. As adoption grows across capital markets, rising fee flows are likely to boost LINK buybacks and help counterbalance the network’s annual token issuance. 

As the broader market corrected, LINK was not spared, down -31.7% year-to-date. Yet the latest moves revealed a notable divergence across holder cohorts. Smaller holders, particularly addresses holding between 1,000 and 10,000 LINK, tended to reduce exposure during downturns, adding to short-term selling pressure. 

In contrast, the larger cohorts, especially those holding 100,000 to 1mn LINK, used the pullbacks to accumulate aggressively, absorbing supply and increasing their share of the circulating token base.