OpenZeppelin Partners With Chainlink to Advance Onchain Finance and Extend the Standards Used by the Vast Majority of the Blockchain Industry

Today we are announcing a strategic partnership with Chainlink, the industry-standard oracle platform, to unite OpenZeppelin with the foundation of onchain finance.

The world's largest financial institutions are moving assets and operations onchain, and they are standardizing on infrastructure proven in production at scale. Applications created with OpenZeppelin standards, including 9 of the top 10 stablecoins, 10 of the top 10 tokenized money market funds, and leading DeFi protocols such as Aave, Lido, Ethena, and Uniswap. Chainlink is the only all-in-one oracle platform for advanced blockchain applications that interoperate across blockchains and existing systems while embedding critical data, compliance, and privacy capabilities, with adoptions by institutions such as DTCC, Swift, Euroclear, Mastercard, ANZ, and more, and top protocols including Aave, Polymarket, Lido, and others.

Yet accessing these capabilities together has meant integrating separate systems, writing custom code, and absorbing additional security and implementation complexity.

This partnership removes that friction. We have embedded the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) directly into OpenZeppelin tooling, so teams can work with cross-chain interoperability and programmable compliance standards in the environments they already use. We have also established a migration path from OpenZeppelin Defender to the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), which will power the upcoming production-grade institutional solutions and provide the orchestration layer for advanced financial workflows. The result is a single, trusted foundation for the institutional and enterprise applications defining the next generation of onchain finance, combining the OpenZeppelin standard behind more than $38 trillion in value transferred with Chainlink infrastructure that has enabled over $36 trillion in transaction value.

What's live today and what's coming

Starting today, CCIP and ACE are live natively across our Wizards, AI tooling, Skills, and documentation, with UI Builder support coming in a future release. A dedicated cross-chain option packages the token primitives required for Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard compatibility into a clear configuration path, while a new compliance option adds the hooks and policy references needed to enforce requirements such as sanctions screening, KYC checks, volume limits, and Secure Mint. This makes CCIP and ACE the default solution powering ERC-20, ERC-3643, and future token standards built with OpenZeppelin’s tooling, with compliance policies that can be updated without redeploying the core token contract.

Over the coming months, the partnership will deliver three production-grade institutional reference solutions. Each will combine our smart contracts with CRE workflows and include deployable reference code, architecture documentation, a threat model, security considerations, and our internal quality review. Available initially for private evaluation, internal development, testing, and customer demonstrations, these implementations will provide rigorously reviewed blueprints for advanced onchain applications.

For teams running applicable workflows on OpenZeppelin Defender, a dedicated Defender-to-CRE migration guide is available today, including a worked example of a full migration, with targeted support to help suitable teams transition established functionality to CRE without rebuilding from scratch.

"OpenZeppelin and Chainlink each set a standard: we secure how onchain systems are developed, and Chainlink connects them to the data, chains, privacy, compliance and orchestration they depend on to securely scale. Embedding CRE, CCIP, and ACE natively into the OpenZeppelin development flow gives developers and institutions a clearer path from design to deployment, from tokenized assets and compliant financial products to entirely new onchain markets."

Jonathan Alexander, CTO, OpenZeppelin

What This Means for Institutions

For financial institutions and enterprises, this partnership shortens the path from strategy to production. Tokenized assets can be designed with compliance built in from day one, with requirements such as sanctions screening, KYC checks, and volume limits enforced at the token level and updated as regulatory obligations evolve, without redeploying core contracts. Cross-chain capabilities allow assets and applications to operate across public, private, and enterprise blockchains as well as existing institutional systems, rather than being confined to a single network.

The reference solutions will give institutional teams rigorously reviewed deployment architectures to evaluate and adapt, reducing implementation risk and the diligence burden of assembling this infrastructure independently. Every component rests on the two stacks institutions already rely on: OpenZeppelin for secure smart contract development and Chainlink for data, interoperability, orchestration, and compliance services.

"OpenZeppelin's smart contract tooling is used by the vast majority of the industry and major institutions like BlackRock, WisdomTree, Franklin Templeton, and more. Embedding Chainlink into those familiar development environments gives builders a production-ready foundation for applications requiring secure orchestration, cross-chain connectivity, and programmable compliance. We're excited to unlock the next generation of institutional onchain applications built with OpenZeppelin."

Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer, Chainlink Labs

Together, OpenZeppelin and Chainlink are aligned on a shared goal: equipping institutional teams with secure, best-in-class solutions as they move the world’s financial systems onchain.

What This Means for Developers

Through this partnership, Chainlink infrastructure becomes core to the development environments tens of thousands of developers already use:

• CCIP enables secure cross-chain token deployment.
• ACE makes programmable compliance part of token design, with policies that can evolve after deployment.
• CRE provides the orchestration layer for advanced financial workflows and applicable Defender migrations.

The result is less bespoke integration work, a clearer path from design to live deployment, and reusable implementation patterns for applications that must operate securely across chains, systems, and regulatory environments.

About OpenZeppelin

OpenZeppelin is the security standard for onchain finance. Since 2015, the company has set the bar for blockchain and smart contract security through the industry-standard OpenZeppelin Contracts library, behind $38 trillion in value transferred, and 900+ security engagements that have surfaced 10,000+ vulnerabilities before production. OpenZeppelin secures the world's leading blockchain networks, DeFi protocols, institutions, and enterprises globally.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry-standard oracle platform bringing the capital markets onchain and the market leader powering the majority of DeFi. The Chainlink stack provides the essential data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards needed to power advanced blockchain use cases for institutional tokenized assets, lending, payments, stablecoins, and more. Since inventing decentralized oracle networks, Chainlink has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value and now secures the vast majority of DeFi.