Chainlink launches a LINK reserve

Chainlink has launched a new initiative to strengthen the long-term sustainability of its protocol by establishing the Chainlink Reserve.

The initiative, powered by Chainlink’s Payment Abstraction framework, aims to accumulate LINK from real revenue streams, both off-chain and on-chain, generated by the platform’s expanding network of enterprise integrations and decentralized services.

“We do not expect any withdrawals from the Reserve for multiple years, and thus it is expected to grow over time,” the Chainlink team stated in its official announcement.

Payment Abstraction will power Chainlink Reserve

The Chainlink Reserve is built on Ethereum and acts as a smart contract that stores LINK acquired through various fee-based services offered by the Chainlink ecosystem. This includes both on-chain service usage and off-chain revenue from enterprise partnerships, which Chainlink says already accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The conversion of these revenue streams into LINK is handled by Payment Abstraction, a system that was introduced earlier this year. It enables users to pay in multiple currencies while ensuring that the underlying economics of the Chainlink network still revolve around LINK.

As part of this latest upgrade, Payment Abstraction now supports off-chain payments as well, allowing revenue from traditional enterprises and institutions to be funneled into LINK through automated smart contract logic.

According to Chainlink, more than $1 million worth of LINK has already been deposited into the reserve since the system quietly went live in its early phase.

The reserve is secured with a multi-day timelock to ensure transparency and prevent sudden withdrawals. It has also launched an analytics dashboard tracking its growth publicly at reserve.chain.link. The reserve’s smart contract can also be viewed on Etherscan.