Chainlink SmartCon 2025 Highlights $20 Trillion in Onchain Value and Key Institutional Adoption

CoinDesk announced a re-air of the final day of Chainlink SmartCon 2025, inviting viewers to catch the complete Day 2 discussions at 11:00 p.m. EST. The conference, held in New York City on November 4-5, 2025, focused on "the blueprint for tokenization, regulatory compliance, and the next evolution of Web3," as stated by CoinDesk in its social media post. SmartCon 2025 brought together governments, financial institutions, and Web3 projects to shape the future of finance onchain.

A significant announcement from the event was the launch of the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), an orchestration layer designed to facilitate institutional-grade smart contracts. This technology aims to connect external data, enable cross-chain functionality, and ensure compliance and privacy for advanced onchain finance use cases, including stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov emphasized that CRE is crucial for expanding the industry from trillions to hundreds of trillions in value.

Further enhancing the platform's capabilities, Chainlink introduced Confidential Compute, a service enabling private smart contracts on any blockchain. This innovation addresses the critical need for privacy in institutional adoption, allowing for confidential transactions, privacy-preserving tokenization of RWAs, and secure data distribution. The early access version of Confidential Compute is slated for release in early 2026.

Regulatory compliance was a central theme, with the unveiling of the Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) partner ecosystem, comprising over 20 compliance providers and frameworks. ACE integrates solutions from entities like Chainalysis and TRM Labs to enable onchain compliance, monitoring, and reporting. Institutions such as Fidelity International and WisdomTree are already adopting ACE to manage identity and transaction eligibility for tokenized assets.

The conference also showcased major institutional collaborations, underscoring the growing integration of traditional finance with blockchain technology. UBS successfully completed the world's first in-production, end-to-end tokenized fund workflow leveraging the Chainlink Digital Transfer Agent (DTA) standard, demonstrating automated fund operations. Additionally, FTSE Russell and Tradeweb partnered with Chainlink to publish their global indices and U.S. Treasury benchmark data onchain via DataLink, providing trusted data to over 2,000 onchain applications.