Major oracle provider Chainlink has significantly expanded its Data Streams product with the launch of 24/5 U.S. Equities Streams, providing continuous, real-time market data for U.S. equities and ETFs across trading sessions 24 hours a day, 5 days a week. This initiative is designed to bring the approximately $80 trillion U.S. equities market onchain.
The new data streams are available on more than 40 blockchains, enabling decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols to build onchain equity markets that are not limited to standard U.S. trading hours (9:30 AM – 4:00 PM ET). This allows for the creation of equity perpetuals (perps), prediction markets, synthetic assets, and other financial products that operate around the clock.
Several prominent protocols have already integrated the new service, including Lighter, BitMEX, ApeX, HelloTrade, Decibel, Monaco, Opinion Labs, and Orderly. Chainlink highlighted that Lighter, the second-largest perpetual DEX by volume and the largest ZK rollup on Ethereum, is leveraging the streams as its official real-world asset (RWA) oracle to unlock new low-latency markets.
The data provided includes bid and ask price, bid and ask volume, mid price, last traded price, a staleness indicator, and market status flags. Chainlink states this solves a critical structural problem: while blockchain trading operates nonstop, U.S. equity data has been fragmented and limited to standard hours, creating pricing gaps and blind spots during off-hours.
"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," the Chainlink team announced. They argue this enables smarter pricing logic, enhanced risk management, and faster execution for onchain protocols.
The infrastructure is built on the Chainlink Data Standard, which has to date enabled over $27 trillion in transaction value and delivered over 19 billion verified onchain messages. Chainlink claims its oracles secure roughly 70% of oracle-related DeFi total value locked (TVL).
