Chainlink Shatters Wall Street’s Clock: DeFi Now Trades U.S. Stocks 24/5 with $80Tn Market Onchain
The old market closes; the new one never sleeps. Chainlink just wired the entire $80 trillion U.S. equity market directly into DeFi protocols, bypassing traditional trading hours and data gatekeepers.
The Oracle Breakthrough
Forget delayed quotes and market holidays. Chainlink's latest oracle integration pumps real-time stock prices—think Apple, Tesla, the S&P 500—straight into smart contracts. It cuts out the middleman, letting algorithmic strategies run around the clock.
DeFi's New Playground
Synthetic assets, leveraged index positions, and yield-bearing stock derivatives just got a real-world backbone. Protocols can now build products pegged to traditional finance's biggest arena, all without asking permission from a Wall Street exchange—or paying their archaic data fees.
The 24/5 Reality
While bankers log off for the weekend, decentralized markets keep ticking. This move doesn't just add a feature; it redefines accessibility. Global liquidity meets U.S. capital markets, no brokerage account required.
A cynical take? Wall Street spent decades building moats with proprietary data and trading hours. Chainlink just drained the moat and left the bridge down—all while the old guards were probably checking their watches, waiting for Monday.
https://t.co/DMzBK5yJ71
— Chainlink (@chainlink) January 20, 2026
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.
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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.
.@lighter_xyz, the #2 perp DEX by volume and largest ZK rollup on Ethereum, leverages Chainlink as its official RWA oracle.
By integrating Chainlink's 24/5 Equities Streams as its primary oracle, Lighter is unlocking new low-latency markets that go beyond standard trading hours. pic.twitter.com/1besjKyN8f
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.”
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