Chainlink no longer delivers Asian stock prices from Tokyo and Seoul alone. Since this week, the network's developer documentation lists six exchanges as available: the Korea Exchange, the To
Chainlink no longer delivers Asian stock prices from Tokyo and Seoul alone. Since this week, the network's developer documentation lists six exchanges as available: the Korea Exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges, the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong exchange. Chainlink announced the expansion on Tuesday, according to the portal Cryptowisser, and says the equity markets involved are worth more than $40 trillion combined. The LINK token has barely reacted: on Wednesday morning it trades at $11.18, about €9.94, and remains below its 100-day moving average.
For investors in Germany, the news is mainly a question of context. The new data streams strengthen the business through which Chainlink earns revenue. Whether that turns into demand for the token depends on how many exchanges and protocols actually take up the prices and pay for them. This article explains what sits behind the feeds, which LINK price levels matter now, and what you should keep in mind when buying, when staking and when dealing with the tax office.
The APAC Equities Streams are a data product from the series of so-called RWA Streams. RWA stands for real world assets, meaning assets from traditional finance such as shares, bonds or commodities that are represented on a blockchain. A stream is a continuously updated price that a smart contract can call, for instance to settle a bet on the share price of Samsung or Toyota, or to value a loan secured by tokenized shares.
At launch in June, the streams covered only two venues: the Korea Exchange, with prices in won, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, with prices in yen. Chainlink listed the region's other exchanges as "coming soon" at the time. The table in the documentation now shows the status "Available" for all six. New additions are the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, quoting in yuan, the Taiwan Stock Exchange in Taiwan dollars and the Hong Kong Exchange in Hong Kong dollars.
There is a technical difference that the documentation states openly. For Japan and Korea, Chainlink supplies only quotes, that is bid and ask prices. For China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, actual traded prices are added. Anyone building a product on this data therefore gets a denser data basis from the new markets than from the first two.
For news about new data feeds to matter for the price, it has to be clear how Chainlink earns money from them. The mechanism is simple to describe. A protocol that pulls prices from Chainlink pays for them. Chainlink converts the revenue, whether it arrives on-chain in crypto or off-chain from companies, into LINK and places it in the so-called Chainlink Reserve. The reserve is a project fund from which, by Chainlink's own account, no withdrawals are planned for several years.
That is the lever through which a data product can touch the token: more paid requests mean more LINK that Chainlink buys on the market and locks away. The path is long, however. Months pass between the activation of a feed and meaningful fees, because an exchange or protocol first has to build a product, test it and find users. A new row in a documentation table is therefore an offer, not yet revenue.
This fits the run of announcements over recent days. At the end of October, Chainlink launched 24/7, with continuous prices for tokenized stocks at weekends too, with Aave as the first partner. Shortly before that came CustodySync with Anchorage Digital, for loans against assets held in custody. The Asia feeds are the third building block of the same strategy: Chainlink wants to be the data line between traditional markets and blockchain applications.
At Chainlink, Asian share prices become a data stream for blockchain applications.
One detail in the documentation deserves attention, because reports on the expansion make it sound different. It says products built on the feeds can run outside local trading hours as well. That is true for the products, not for the prices. The APAC streams deliver prices only during regular sessions from Monday to Friday, including the lunch break in Tokyo, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. When an exchange is closed, the feed holds the last price until the next session opens.
Unlike US equities, there is no stream from after-hours trading for Asia. Chainlink explicitly advises protocols not to base liquidations solely on the price gap at the open and to slow down trading in the first minutes of a session. So if you come across a perpetual bet on a Chinese stock on a crypto platform that runs around the clock, keep in mind that the underlying price does not move between the close and the open, and it can jump at the open.
On Wednesday morning LINK stands at $11.18, according to the price on the Kraken exchange. Since midnight UTC the token has gained about 1.5 percent, and over the past 24 hours it traded between $10.62 and $11.29. Bitcoin rose by about 1.2 percent to around $78,280 over the same period. LINK is thus moving in step with the wider market, and the price shows no boost of its own from the Asia news.
The low of $10.62 came during the night after the US election, when the entire market was under pressure. LINK recovering more than half a dollar from there by the morning is a rebound with the market, not a reaction to the feeds. Anyone who wants to measure the effect of the expansion must therefore look at other figures than the daily price: at announcements from exchanges that use the feeds, and at the growth of the reserve.
On November 2 we described how Chainlink had slipped below its 100-day moving average and long bets shrank by a third. The price has barely moved since. LINK closed at $11.10 on November 2 and at $11.02 on November 3, and this morning it stands at $11.18. The 100-day moving average, the mean of the closing prices over the past 100 days, sits at about $11.44 according to Kraken's daily data. That puts the gap at just over 2 percent.
Two things are new since then. First, LINK did not retest the October 30 low of $10.25 even in the election-night sell-off, turning instead at $10.62. Second, with the Asia feeds Chainlink has delivered news that concerns the business and not just sentiment. Nothing has broken, though: the line the price struggled with two days ago remains the next hurdle.
Three levels can be derived from the price data for the coming days. The first is at $11.44, the 100-day moving average. A daily close above it would be the first since October 31, when LINK briefly reached $11.93 and closed at $11.63.
The second level is markedly higher, at about $12.62. That is where the 50-day moving average runs, and it shows how much the price has lost since early October: on October 1 LINK still closed at $14.39, and the high of the past 90 days was $15.77. On the downside, the October 30 low of $10.25 is the level that matters. Below it lies the 200-day moving average at about $10.05, which LINK has not fallen below since the summer.
These levels are calculations from past prices, not a forecast. Where the price could head over a horizon of months, and which assumptions lie behind that, is set out on the Chainlink prediction page linked at the end of this article.
If you want to buy LINK, do so through an exchange licensed under the European crypto regulation MiCA. MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets and has governed EU-wide since the end of 2024 which providers may offer crypto services. A licensed exchange must hold client funds separately and is subject to supervision, in Germany by BaFin.
The differences lie mainly in costs. In our overview Buying Chainlink in Germany we compared five licensed providers with fees of 0.15 to 1.875 percent per purchase. On a purchase of €1,000 that is €1.50 at one end and €18.75 at the other. If you buy regularly, look not only at ease of use but at the spread and the fee for withdrawing to your own wallet. A current overview of providers is in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.
Anyone who locks LINK in the official staking pool waits 28 days to exit.
Many investors wonder whether they can not only hold LINK but also put it to work for a return. Chainlink offers its own staking for this, version 0.2. Staking here means you deposit LINK in a smart contract that secures the network and receive a reward in return. According to Chainlink's staking page, the pool is capped at 45 million LINK, of which 40,875,000 LINK are reserved for the community of token holders. Each address may stake 1 to 15,000 LINK, and only when there is free space in the pool.
The lock-up matters more than the yield. If you want to exit, you start a 28-day cooldown and then have a seven-day window to withdraw the LINK. Miss that window and the waiting period starts again. In a falling market you cannot sell during those four weeks. Chainlink puts the reward at a floor of 4.5 percent a year with a full pool, minus a 4 percent share for node operators, so about 4.32 percent for the community at the launch of this version. The rate is variable.
If there is no space in the official pool, staking remains possible via exchanges and platforms that deploy LINK for their customers. There you carry counterparty risk, and the terms vary widely. Which providers offer staking for which coins, and at what rate, is shown in our comparison of the best staking platforms.
For tax purposes, LINK in Germany falls under the same framework as other crypto assets. Gains from a sale are tax-free under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act if more than one year passes between purchase and sale. If you sell earlier, the gain is taxable once all private disposal gains for the year together reach €1,000; this exemption limit has applied since 2024. Whether the holding period will remain is politically open; our page on the crypto holding period reform summarises the current state.
Staking does not change the holding period for the LINK you deploy. In its letter of March 6, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed that staking does not extend the period to ten years. The staking income itself, by contrast, counts as other income under Section 22 No. 3 and is taxable in the year it is received if, together with other such income, it reaches €256 a year. For the LINK you receive, a separate one-year holding period begins on receipt.
In practice, record the date, amount and euro value for every purchase tranche and every staking credit. Exchanges provide exports for this that can be imported into a tax tool. If you buy and stake across several platforms, such a tool saves you a lot of manual work on your tax return.
The expansion to six Asian exchanges is verifiable progress in Chainlink's business. It has not shown up in the price so far, and that is logical: fees only arise once products run on the feeds. Until then the overall market drives the LINK price, and the levels at $11.44 above and $10.25 below remain the reference points. Three steps help you sort out the situation for yourself:
(As of November 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
