Chainlink Uses Perpetual Futures To Price Assets At Weekends

Chainlink launched a service on 29th October 2026 that supplies blockchain applications with prices for stocks, commodities and other traditional assets through weekends and holidays. Its announcement names lending protocol Aave as the launch partner.

Chainlink 24/7 is intended for loans backed by tokenised assets, digital tokens linked to traditional investments. The blockchain keeps operating after the exchange trading the underlying asset closes. A collateral value still has to support borrowing and liquidation decisions during that gap.

According to Chainlink's published methodology, the new reference combines prices from active trading sessions with quotes from several perpetual futures venues when traditional markets close. Perpetual futures are derivatives that track an asset without a fixed expiry date.

Those weekend observations therefore come from trading in contracts linked to the asset. They are not share transactions on a closed stock exchange. For a lender accepting tokenised shares, the weekend collateral reference therefore reflects the derivatives market.

Chainlink says the service removes stale inputs and limits the effect of unusually high or low quotes. It switches sources as market sessions change, producing one continuous reference for each supported asset. These are the provider's descriptions of its design, rather than independent tests of its performance.

Aave's Stock Loan Plans

Chainlink says Aave is adopting the feeds for Horizon, its institutional lending platform, beginning with actively traded US equities. Aave's own announcement, embedded in the official Link:NYC liveblog, described the service as coming soon to loans backed by stocks. The announcement does not establish that those loans already use the new feeds.

The product extends Chainlink's January 2026 equities service, which covered weekday trading sessions, including trading before and after regular exchange hours and overnight. The latest launch adds weekends and market holidays. Crypto Economy independently reported the derivatives-based pricing mechanism and Aave's planned use.

Chainlink offers two ways to deliver that information. Chainlink says lending protocols can read prices published on the blockchain through Data Feeds, while derivatives platforms can retrieve updates outside the blockchain through Data Streams. Streams also identify the current trading session, allowing an application to adjust its risk settings.

That session context matters because continuous publication alone does not make every trading period equally liquid. Chainlink's existing 24/5 tokenised equity documentation warns that overnight sessions can involve fewer providers, wider spreads and price jumps. It tells developers to test session changes and define what their applications do when a price becomes stale or falls outside acceptable bounds.