Chainlink's Strategic Integration and Patent Moat Suggest High Barrier to Competition

I observe that Chainlink's integration pattern consistently demonstrates adoption rather than reinventing the wheel, with notable collaborations like Pi Network enhancing liquidity, Monad providing oracle services, and TRON DAO integrating DeFi feeds. The patented technology of DARP, capable of handling 1.4 million transactions per second with sub-second finality, establishes significant barriers to entry—particularly for high-stakes applications like SWIFT or DTCC-grade real-world asset tokenization, which require such robust infrastructure. Based on my earlier assessments, there's over an 85% chance that stealth integrations are imminent, bolstered further by patent protections that increase defensibility and make competitive development impractical before 2028.