Chainlink’s Blockchain & AI Fusion Targets $58B Corporate Actions Waste

Forget the middlemen—Chainlink just fired a shot across the bow of a $58 billion paper-pushing industry.

### The Manual Mess

Corporate actions—dividends, mergers, stock splits—run on faxes, spreadsheets, and human error. It's a costly, slow dance of reconciliation where mistakes mean real money lost. The system isn't just broken; it's expensive by design.

### The Automated Answer

Enter Chainlink's new system. It marries blockchain's immutable ledger with AI's pattern recognition. Smart contracts auto-execute payouts when conditions are met. AI cross-references data feeds, flagging discrepancies before they become disputes. The network cuts out layers of manual verification—and the fees that come with them.

### Why This Cuts Deep

This isn't about making existing processes slightly faster. It's about dismantling them. The target is the entire cost structure built on friction. By automating trust and verification, the system bypasses traditional custodians and asset servicers. The savings? A slice of that infamous $58 billion annual cost.

### The Finance Jab

It's a move that highlights a quiet truth in finance: complexity is often a feature, not a bug—it's how you bill for it. Chainlink's play exposes the lucrative inefficiency at the heart of traditional markets.

### The Bottom Line

This is more than a tech upgrade. It's a direct challenge to a legacy revenue model. If it works, it doesn't just save money—it redefines where value is captured in the financial stack. The old guard won't retire quietly, but for the first time, they might have to justify their price tag.

Chainlink’s new infrastructure builds on its Phase 1 project

Inefficiencies in today’s corporate actions lifecycle cost $58B annually.

How Chainlink & 24 of the world's largest financial institutions are solving this problem with AI:https://t.co/8N8PpDyaHL pic.twitter.com/IAKWwDWmCn

— Chainlink (@chainlink) December 17, 2025

Chainlink noted that the global cost of corporate actions processing has surpassed $58 billion annually. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation reported that informal disclosures, repetitive validation steps, and inconsistent data flows across systems drove the surge in corporate actions processing.

Citi reported that the average cost of handling a single event currently costs $34 million across more than 110,000 firm interactions. The firm also noted that annual processing costs have surged by 10% in 2025.

“By leveraging DLT, we can bring increased levels of transparency, connectivity, and accuracy to the ecosystem. We welcomed the opportunity to bring this use case to life and demonstrate how innovative technology can transform processes and deliver new capabilities and value to the industry.”

–Dan Doney, Managing Director & Chief Technology Officer at DTCC Digital Assets.

Chainlink stated that the new infrastructure builds on Phase 1 of its project, where it partnered with Swift, Euroclear, and six financial institutions. The firms managed to demonstrate that corporate actions processing could be reduced significantly. 

The decentralized oracle network revealed that the firms were able to demonstrate that large language models can extract structured data from informal corporate action announcements. They were also able to publish the data on-chain as a unified golden record. 

Chainlink plans to advance the project in Phase 2 into a solution that satisfies the requirements of the current leading financial institution. The firm said Phase 2 demonstrated improved speed, reach, and accessibility of corporate actions data.

Financial institutions Leveraged the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) to process, validate, and cross-system distribute corporate actions data using the Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). CRE transformed the validated AI model outputs into an ISO 20022 message format, while CCIP distributed the records to DTCC’s blockchain ecosystem and other blockchains.

Chainlink seeks to address market participants’ concerns in Phase 1

Chainlink stated that Phase 2 will focus on solving timing delays, which currently take 24 to 48 hours for corporate action data to reach asset managers from the initial announcement.

The firm also hopes to mitigate the loss of corporate action data, driven by a distortion caused when different intermediaries apply different processing logic. Phase 2 will also aim to prevent data fragmentation, which is caused by the publication of corporate actions in various formats and channels. 

The decentralized oracle network revealed that Phase 2 will introduce a new data attestor role, enabling regulated institutions to confirm the accuracy of corporate action data. The initiative aims to address concerns about authenticity raised by market participants in the previous phase.

Chainlink is working to enable data contributors to provide missing information, which is often excluded from initial disclosures. The firm also plans to support integration with traditional financial infrastructure by generating ISO 20022-compliant messages to ease data delivery.

Mark Garabedian, Director of Digital Assets & Tokenization at Wellington Management, said it’s essential for asset managers to receive accurate corporate actions data quickly and consistently in a standardized format.

Chainlink aims to expand the system’s role in the next phase by extending the current processing workflow to support more complex on-chain corporate actions for equities. The firm plans to enable events such as stock splits to be recorded and attested to across market participants.

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