Chainlink has expanded its Data Streams product to include 24/5 coverage for U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds, a move aimed at allowing decentralized trading platforms to price stocks during pre-market, post-market and overnight sessions.
According to the company, the upgrade addresses a liquidity gap in on-chain trading in real-world assets (RWAs). Historically, US stock feeds only covered regular market hours, leaving decentralized exchanges unable to maintain accurate prices overnight or during pre-market sessions.
That meant developers halted trading or took unnecessary risks, leaving U.S. stocks “significantly underrepresented in the chain.”
Chainlink’s move, separate from the Price Feeds offering, is specifically designed for U.S. stocks to operate on-chain, according to a press release shared with CoinDesk.
Where Price Feeds push periodic updates suitable for lending platforms like Aave, Data Streams work on a ‘pull’ model. According to Chainlink, this approach is designed to support high-frequency trading by only providing sub-second updates when a transaction occurs, reducing the network gas costs associated with constant on-chain reporting.
The extended feeds also include metadata such as market status flags and bid/ask spreads, which are necessary for protocols to adjust risk parameters when liquidity declines during overnight trading.
The 24/5 data rollout is part of a broader push to reflect the full lifecycle of traditional assets on-chain. The company also partners with Swift, Euroclear and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) to automate corporate actions such as dividends, stock splits and mergers.
That infrastructure is designed to ensure that tokenized assets reflect key changes in the underlying stocks without manual intervention and to reduce the risk of errors.
Together, the two systems, Trading Data Streams and Asset Maintenance Business Actions Infrastructure, aim to replicate how financial instruments behave in the real world. The result is a setup in which tokenized equity remains functional and accurate even after business hours, bringing blockchain-based markets more closely aligned with the mechanics of traditional finance.
Major derivatives exchanges, including BitMEX and Lighter, are now using the product to offer perpetual futures contracts – which have no expiration date – on US stocks and ETFs.
Chainlink’s announcement comes just a day after the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) unveiled plans to introduce a 24-hour, blockchain-based tokenized stock and ETF trading platform later this year.
Credit : cryptonews.net
