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- Joshi, Chainlink’s CPO, explained at SmartCon that the company is evolving from individual protocols to supporting infrastructure at a national scale.
- LINK serves as Chainlink’s native token, and if the partnerships and fundamentals align, a rise toward the $30–$40 range appears plausible.
The SmartCon 2025 is a flagship event for Chainlink Labs and the wider Web3 ecosystem. The event took place on November 4-5, 2025, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City, bringing together government, traditional finance, and Web3 leaders under the theme of bridging on-chain and off-chain finance.
In his keynote speech, Apurva Joshi, Chief Product Officer of Chainlink Labs, said: “We’ve been powering protocols, then markets, now nations. That is what winning looks like.”
He made this remark while referencing the U.S. Department of Commerce’s August decision to collaborate with Chainlink to bring macroeconomic data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on-chain.
Additionally, Chainlink has engaged with the U.S. SEC Crypto Task Force to emphasize the importance of robust compliance frameworks, further highlighting the network’s focus on secure, regulated solutions.
Industry Participation and Network Progress
The agenda at SmartCon 2025 reinforced Chainlink’s vision, featuring sessions on the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs), bridging TradFi and DeFi, inter-chain settlement, and other foundational topics.
Chainlink’s on-chain infrastructure products, the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), cross-chain interoperability solutions, and oracle frameworks, were positioned as essential plumbing for the blockchain ecosystem.
The event also brought together voices from across the industry, including Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets at The White House, Justin Sun, founder of TRON, and Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave Labs.
Before the conference, Chainlink introduced the Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) partner ecosystem, a network of 20+ leading compliance providers that are standardizing how compliance is handled on-chain. This initiative establishes ACE as the de facto framework for on-chain compliance, enabling trusted data providers to integrate seamlessly into blockchain-based financial workflows.
At launch, the ACE partner ecosystem included industry leaders such as Persona, Proof, SumSub, World, GLIEF, and Veridian by the Cardano Foundation. Each of these vendors is integrating its data and services into ACE to support identity verification, risk assessment, and regulatory adherence across decentralized networks.
In parallel, Chainlink and Apex Group have just completed a pilot solution for institutional-grade stablecoin infrastructure that was conducted in collaboration with the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA). This pilot was powered by Chainlink standards and services, including the CCIP, ACE, and Proof of Reserve (PoR).
Chainlink Confidential Compute
At SmartCon, Chainlink extended its institutional infrastructure suite with the announcement of Chainlink Confidential Compute, a service designed to unlock private smart contracts on any blockchain. Confidential Compute enables a new class of privacy-preserving applications across the blockchain ecosystem.
The service supports private transactions, confidential DeFi workflows, and privacy-preserving tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs). For enterprises, there’s confidential data distribution, regulatory use cases, privacy-preserving cross-chain interoperability, privacy-preserving identity, and compliance. The system is powered by CRE, and the early Access version of CCC is scheduled to launch in early 2026.
LINK Price Outlook
Cryptocurrency analyst Michaël van de Poppe recently suggested that current market conditions present “a great spot to be accumulating $LINK,” expressing confidence that the token is “ready to be making a new leg upwards,” a sentiment tied to his prediction of a strong DeFi move in 2026.
At the time of writing, LINK is trading around $15.42, down 4.4% in the past 24 hours, but it has found some support at $15.24, gaining 3.7% over the past seven days while losing 1.7% over the last two weeks. Analyst Ali Martinez has identified the $13–$26 range as a “no-trade zone”.
Investor Jordan remains optimistic, suggesting that Chainlink could potentially trade above $100 before year-end.
