The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation ( DTCC ) has completed a pilot project with blockchain oracle Chainlink and US-based financial institutions. In essence, this initiative aimed to expedite the tokenization of funds, and the resulting project, named Smart NAV, aims to create a standardised method for distributing net asset value (NAV) data of funds across various private and public blockchains using Chainlink's interoperability protocol CCIP.

Participants in the project included American Century Investments, BNY Mellon, Edward Jones, Franklin Templeton, Invesco, JPMorgan, MFS Investment Management, Mid Atlantic Trust, State Street, and US Bank. The pilot demonstrated that delivering structured data on-chain and establishing standard roles and processes can integrate foundational data into numerous on-chain applications, such as tokenized funds and 'bulk consumer' smart contracts, which store data for multiple funds. This pilot coincides with the growing trend of tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) such as bonds, funds, and other traditional investments.

According to coindesk.com, prominent financial institutions, including BlackRock, Citi, and HSBC, are exploring this technology to achieve benefits such as operational efficiencies, faster settlements, and enhanced transparency compared to conventional financial systems. Other developments from Chainlink In April 2024, Chainlink launched Transporter, which is a secure app for bridging tokens and messages across blockchains. Built in association with the Chainlink Foundation, with support from Chainlink Labs, Transporter provided users with an intuitive interface for submitting and monitoring cross-chain transactions on CCIP, a standard for cross-chain interoperability.

With a defense-in-depth security model backed by time-tested Chainlink infrastructure, Transporter enabled users to transfer tokens across a variety of blockchains, starting with Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and WEMIX. At the time, Chainking officials explained that Transporter made it easier to leverage the security benefits of Chainlink CCIP for the transfer of large token value and critical messages across chains. In February 2024, Chainlink announced its support for PYUSD (PayPal’s USD-backed stablecoin issued by Paxos) Price Feed on the Ethereum mainnet.

Secured by the industry-standard oracle network Chainlink, the new PYUSD Price Feed allowed users to view highly accurate, reliable, and decentralised market data for PYUSD on the blockchain. This provided users with the information needed to help create secure markets around PYUSD and adopt it as their preferred stablecoin to facilitate on-chain payments. .