Overview

Stream Categories and Report Schemas

Each stream category uses one or more report schemas to deliver data. Several categories of Data Streams offer more than one schema to accommodate specialized use cases.

Cryptocurrency Streams

Cryptocurrency streams deliver high-frequency market data for digital assets.

• Standard crypto streams aggregate order-book liquidity across top venues to provide a consensus mid price alongside simulated bid and ask levels.
• DEX State Price streams derive pricing from onchain liquidity pools to reflect decentralized market conditions.

Standard Crypto (v3)

Chainlink Cryptocurrency Reports provide market data for digital assets, supporting high-frequency, onchain use cases. Each report includes a consensus mid price (price), as well as simulated bid (bid) and ask (ask) prices that estimate the impact of buying or selling at a specified liquidity depth. These values help protocols and applications understand current market conditions and potential slippage for larger trades.

For a deeper explanation of how liquidity-weighted bid and ask prices work, see Liquidity-Weighted Bid-Ask Prices (LWBA).

DEX State Price (v3)

Chainlink DEX State Price Reports are designed for assets that derive most or all of their liquidity from decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Unlike standard crypto price streams, these reports use onchain market data to reflect the unique conditions of AMM pools and DEX-dominant tokens. In this report, the price, bid, and ask fields are all equal, representing the execution price a trader would receive based on the current state of onchain liquidity pools, rather than order-book mechanics. This approach enables accurate, real-time pricing, even for long-tail or newly launched tokens in low-volume environments.

The DEX State Price methodology aggregates data from multiple DEX pools, applies volume and TVL-based weighting, and uses filters to reduce manipulation and smooth volatility. Users should be aware of the specific risks inherent to DeFi, such as smart contract vulnerabilities, bridge dependencies, and external price manipulation. It is important to review risk mitigation guidance and adjust protocol parameters accordingly when integrating DEX State Price Reports.

For more details on the methodology and risk considerations, see DEX State Price Streams.

Exchange Rate Streams

Exchange Rate streams use Report Schema v7 to provide tamper-proof access to the exchange rate of tokenized assets. Exchange rates typically read directly from onchain smart contracts and generally have a single calculating agent: the issuing protocol. This schema reports one main value: the exchange rate (exchangeRate).

While the Data Streams architecture is designed to deliver updates at least once per second, the exchange rate itself is often updated only once per day by the data source, in line with standard market practices. Data Streams ensures that any Exchange Rate update, whenever it occurs, is captured and made available immediately and at low latency, allowing seamless integration into onchain applications alongside other real-time data streams.

RWA Streams

Chainlink RWA streams deliver real-world asset pricing through two report schemas:

• Standard RWA uses Report Schema v8 for consolidated mid prices, market status, and freshness signals during traditional market sessions.
• RWA+ uses Report Schema v11 to extend coverage into pre-market, post-market, overnight, and weekend sessions with additional liquidity and trade context.

RWA (v8)

Chainlink RWA streams provide fresh, reliable, and accurate financial market data for real-world assets, enabling DeFi users to gain onchain exposure to physical assets. Each report includes a staleness measure (lastUpdateTimestamp), consensus median price (midPrice) and market status (marketStatus).

RWA assets trade on traditional exchanges during market hours. These market hours vary by asset class and can be subject to unexpected halts, pauses and other behaviors affecting traditional markets. For this reason, this class of Data Streams contains a market hours flag and a staleness measure to equip our users to handle these events correctly. It is critical that users implement correct safeguards on their end to pause markets, add more conservative risk caps, or do whatever else is appropriate for their application.

RWA+ (v11)

Chainlink RWA streams extend standard RWA coverage by tracking liquidity and trading activity across pre-market, post-market, overnight, and weekend sessions. Report Schema v11 adds liquidity-weighted mid, consensus bid and ask, resting book depth (bidVolume, askVolume), the most recent execution (lastTradedPrice), and nanosecond precision freshness (lastSeenTimestampNs) while retaining the marketStatus field. These additions enable protocols to adjust risk and settlement logic dynamically during non-regular trading hours.

NAV Streams

Chainlink NAV streams use Report Schema v9 to provide real-time, tamper-proof access to the Net Asset Value (navPerShare) of tokenized assets, funds, or portfolios. Each report includes NAV per share (navPerShare), NAV date (navDate), assets under management (aum), and ripcord status (ripcord). The ripcord is set to true (1) by the asset issuer when the consumer should ignore the value being sent (for cases such as maintenance, upstream data source outages, etc). The feed data will remain stale until the ripcord returns false (0).

NAV is a fundamental financial metric that represents the value of an investment vehicle such as a mutual fund or ETF and is calculated as the total assets minus the total liabilities.

Data Streams ensures that any NAV update, whenever it occurs, is captured and made available immediately and at low latency, allowing for seamless integration with onchain applications alongside other real-time data streams. Although the NAV value may not change frequently, Data Streams provides the most recent NAV as soon as it is published by the source.

Backed xStock Streams

Backed xStock streams use Report Schema v10 to provide financial market data for tokenized equities such as xStock assets. These streams combine data from US equity streams with data from the tokenization service to enable users to handle corporate actions affecting the underlying equities. Each report includes the staleness measure (lastUpdateTimestamp), consensus mid price (price), market status (marketStatus), current multiplier (currentMultiplier, the number of underlying shares each xStock is redeemable for), new multiplier (newMultiplier, the future number of shares after a scheduled corporate action), activation date/time of the corporate action (activationDateTime) and the tokenized price if available on primary or secondary markets (tokenizedPrice).

The underlying US equities trade on traditional exchanges during market hours. These market hours depend per asset class and can be subject to unexpected halts, pauses and other behaviors affecting traditional markets. For this reason, this class of Data Streams contains a market hours flag and a staleness measure to equip our users to handle these events correctly. It is critical that users implement correct safeguards on their end to pause markets, add more conservative risk caps, or implement other measures appropriate for their application.

The schema is designed specifically for tokenized equities such as xStocks and contains data from the Chainlink US equities streams, combined with data provided by the tokenizer to properly handle corporate actions. With this enhanced data users are able to handle expected and unexpected market events such as pauses, halts and market off hours. The tokenization provider layers in data around the currentMultiplier, the newMultiplier and the activationDateTime of the new multiplier to handle corporate actions.