Just days after launching Build on Solana, Chainlink Labs announced that Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) has officially gone live on the Solana mainnet, marking a significant milestone for cross-chain DeFi. This launch unlocks seamless access to over $19 billion in assets, enabling smooth transfers between Solana and other leading blockchains.
CCIP’s v1.6 upgrade introduces support for non-EVM chains starting with Solana mainnet, making Solana the first non-EVM chain with CCIP functionality.
"Launching CCIP on Solana is a pivotal milestone for the industry as Chainlink's highly secure and reliable infrastructure provides users access to one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in Web3. Solana's high throughput, low fees, and large developer community make it an ideal environment for building next-generation, cross-chain applications. With CCIP, leading projects representing billions of dollars in market cap can now move assets into the Solana ecosystem, laying the foundation for an asset-rich ecosystem that attracts institutional capital, deepens liquidity, and expands the footprint of tokenized RWAs." — Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs.
What is CCIP?
Launched in July 2023, CCIP is a universal messaging and token transfer protocol, enabling secure and efficient communication across different blockchain ecosystems. Its integration with Solana expands the network’s functionality, equipping developers with powerful tools to build more versatile and interconnected DeFi applications.
Chainlink’s CCIP has grown steadily since its initial rollout, with earlier integrations on EVM-compatible chains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism. The Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard in CCIP v1.5 enables any ERC-20-compatible token to become cross-chain-native within minutes, without changing existing smart contracts. With the v1.6 upgrade on Solana, CCIP becomes fully VM-agnostic, supporting both EVM and non-EVM chains, and advancing Chainlink’s vision of a truly interoperable Web3 infrastructure.
Developer Adoption and Ecosystem Growth
The launch of CCIP on Solana is expected to accelerate developer adoption by enabling the creation of innovative cross-chain applications. This integration is set to play a key role in driving the growth and evolution of the Solana DeFi ecosystem.
This integration enables projects like Solv, Backed Finance, and Shiba Inu to expand their existing CCIP-enabled tokens into the Solana ecosystem using the CCT Standard. They’re joined by new teams planning to adopt the CCT standard on Solana, including ElizaOS, The Graph, Maple Finance, Pepe, Zeus Network, and others. These CCTs represent a combined market cap of over $19 billion.
The launch of CCIP on Solana unlocks significant opportunities for users and developers by delivering secure, cross-chain infrastructure capable of supporting institutional-grade blockchain applications. Powered by the same oracle networks that once secured $75 billion in DeFi TVL, CCIP enhances Solana’s scalability while upholding the highest security and reliability standards.
With this integration, Solana is now connected to Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Optimism, and Sonic via CCIP, with additional chains on the horizon. CCIP-enabled bridging platforms such as Interport, OpenOcean, Transporter, and XSwap are also integrating Solana support, expanding the network’s interoperability even further.
What This Could Mean for Solana
Chainlink’s CCIP has played a key role in advancing the growth of Real World Assets (RWA) within the DeFi ecosystem. Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, predicts that RWA tokens are on track to hold more value onchain than cryptocurrencies. He believes that the best RWAs are the ones that open up a new market and do it with a form of the financial product that is more efficient.
With rwa.xyz data showing that Solana has less than 3% of RWA TVL, Chainlink’s CCIP integration could not have come sooner.
Chainlink’s technology is strategically positioned to support the expanding Real World Asset (RWA) sector, aiming to become the global standard for RWA tokenization. The company is actively involved in key initiatives such as Singapore’s Project Guardian, where it is piloting privacy-preserving features for the settlement of tokenized RWAs.
These efforts highlight Chainlink’s pivotal role in bridging traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), accelerating the adoption of RWA tokenization and driving deeper integration between the two financial worlds.
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