During Injective Summit 2026, Chainlink Labs’ Principal Solutions Lead, Charlie Durkin, sat down with Thinking Crypto podcast host Tony Edward to discuss how Chainlink is taking global financial institutions from pilot to production.
After a decade spent working in traditional finance at Citi, Durkin joined Chainlink to help maximize the efficiencies blockchain technology offers in virtually every facet of traditional finance, from payments to securities issuance.
“We are past the point of asking if this is a viable economic use case. Everyone is on board that instantaneous settlement and 24/7 markets make sense.”
The next step is building blockchain rails that are compatible with legacy financial systems.
“The missing piece that is powering tokenization from pilot to production is really orchestration. Tokenization doesn’t exist solely on a blockchain. It needs to communicate with data compliance rules and workflows that live in legacy systems.”
The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) provides this vital orchestration layer, allowing institutions to seamlessly connect with onchain finance. Built to capture tokenization’s $867 trillion market opportunity, CRE dramatically accelerates the rate at which institutional capital can flow onchain.
DTCC, the primary financial market infrastructure for U.S. capital markets, is collaborating with Chainlink to facilitate 24/7 near real-time collateral management across global financial markets and blockchains. Slated for a Q4 commercial launch, DTCC’s Collateral AppChain leverages CRE and Chainlink’s data standard.
Chainlink also plays a key role in Project Pangea, an initiative to unlock T+0 cross-border settlement. The task force unites dozens of global financial institutions across Europe and South Korea to establish a scalable multi-currency settlement network that leverages Chainlink’s data, interoperability, and orchestration standards to processes over $9.6 trillion in daily FX market trading volume without major bottlenecks caused by current infrastructure.
“The throughline, whether you are a market infrastructure provider, a bank, a leading fintech or web3 native, is you are looking to Chainlink for the security and reliability that come with our standards,” Durkin said.
He explained how CRE allows banks and asset managers to leverage stablecoins seamlessly alongside tokenized deposits with different issuers, risk profiles, and regulatory requirements.
“This is where the Chainlink Runtime Environment is able to allow them to have a single integration point into their legacy systems and then power an onchain action with compliance embedded.”
Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) facilitates secure and compliant connectivity between onchain and offchain environments.
“It makes noncompliance impossible onchain because you now have a smart contract executing code that says absolutely this wallet cannot own this asset,” Durkin explained.
“You’re codifying this and ensuring that a mistake can’t happen because you have smart contracts executing this instead of manual workflows as it does today.”
The end goal is to abstract away the technical complexities of different assets on different chains in different regions so anyone in the world can interact with the onchain financial system in the exact same way.
“The connectivity that Chainlink is working on with partners will make it feel like one market and everything will be seamless and abstracted away from the end user.”
Watch the full conversation.
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