Observers say the move could transform traditional reference indices into programmable and verifiable financial primitives.
FTSE Russell, a global index and data provider, is publishing its market index data on blockchain networks for the first time through Chainlink, a decentralized oracle service widely used across financial and blockchain applications.
The index’s equity, FX, and digital asset benchmarks will be published on multiple blockchains via DataLink, a Chainlink service that connects traditional financial data to over 2,000 applications across more than 50 networks.
Bringing index data on-chain through Chainlink’s infrastructure would help “securely distribute underlying data” from FTSE Russell’s benchmarks and give trusted, quality data “that powers traditional finance” to institutions and developers, Fiona Bassett, CEO at FTSE Russell, said in a statement on Monday.
The integration makes FTSE Russell’s global indices continuously available on-chain, allowing developers to securely reference and use them across multiple chains and networks.
Publishing data on-chain “turns traditional reference indices into programmable, verifiable financial primitives,” Ram Kumar, core contributor at blockchain infrastructure firm OpenLedger, told Decrypt.
It’s a collaboration that “bridges TradFi standards with DeFi infrastructure,” making “canonical benchmarks natively available,” while helping “bring institutional legitimacy” to on-chain finance, Kumar explained.
Oracles act as data bridges between blockchains and the outside world, feeding information that smart contracts cannot access on their own.
Each oracle network collects data from trusted sources, verifies it through multiple independent nodes, and delivers a cryptographically signed record on-chain. The process ensures accuracy and transparency without relying on a single intermediary.
It also lets institutions and users rely on the same verified market data for trading, investing, or building financial products directly on blockchain networks.
Chainlink’s oracle framework extends this model to institutional data, standardizing how such data, including prices and index values, is verified and shared on-chain, enabling financial contracts to use real-world information securely.
FTSE’s indices, meanwhile, serve as key benchmarks for global equity and asset performance, often determining which stocks or companies are included in significant investment portfolios.
Having these data sets on-chain allows institutions to “launch tokenized index products and structured notes with real-time, on-chain price feeds backed by a trusted $18 trillion benchmark provider,” Kumar added.
Developers, meanwhile, would gain access “to deterministic, high-integrity data for building index-tracking vaults, options, or autonomous agents that rebalance to benchmark moves,” that could help enable “auditable risk management,” he said.
