The Chainlink Reserve is an on-chain contract on Ethereum that accumulates LINK. It is funded by Payment Abstraction, the system that converts fees Chainlink earns into LINK. Those fees are off-chain enterprise revenue and on-chain service fees paid in other tokens. Chainlink says it does not expect any withdrawals from the Reserve for multiple years.
This guide covers the contract itself, the path fees take to reach it, the timelock around it, what it is not and how to read its balance yourself. Everything is mechanism: how it is built and what the chain shows. On 7 November 2026 the Reserve held 6,569,599.73 LINK.
The short version
- The Reserve is an Ethereum contract at
0x9A709B7B69EA42D5eeb1ceBC48674C69E1569eC6. Chainlink announced it on 7 August 2025. - Payment Abstraction converts fees paid in other tokens into LINK using CCIP, Chainlink Automation, a decentralized exchange and Price Feeds. The LINK passes through a second contract, called Reserves, before it reaches the Reserve.
- The verified code at the Reserve address is a generic timelock. Its minimum delay was 2 days on 7 November 2026, and the contract can change that setting.
- On chain we counted 67 deposits from the Payment Abstraction contract through 5 November 2026, every one on a Thursday (UTC). No LINK has left since the 7 August 2025 announcement.
- Chainlink does not describe the Reserve as a buyback or any payout to token holders.
What Chainlink says the Reserve is
Chainlink introduced the Reserve on 7 August 2025 in a post titled “Introducing the Chainlink Reserve”. It describes the Reserve as designed to “support the long-term growth and sustainability of the Chainlink Network” by accumulating LINK from off-chain revenue from large enterprises and from on-chain service usage.
The technical description is short: an on-chain smart contract on Ethereum that “operates as an extension of Payment Abstraction and stores a strategic reserve of LINK”. The contract also has what Chainlink calls a multi-day timelock before withdrawal requests are processed. The contract address is 0x9A709B7B69EA42D5eeb1ceBC48674C69E1569eC6. Chainlink’s LINK Token Contracts page in its documentation has a section on the Reserve, and its dashboard at metrics.chain.link/reserve shows a running total.
Chainlink’s own forward-looking disclaimer says anticipated uses of the Reserve are only predictions, and the post names no specific use for the LINK.
How Payment Abstraction funds it
Payment Abstraction is Chainlink’s on-chain infrastructure for paying for services in a form other than LINK. It went live on Ethereum mainnet on 31 March 2025, first connected to SVR so that Chainlink’s share of recaptured liquidation MEV could be converted to LINK. With the Reserve launch, Chainlink said it expanded to cover off-chain payments and several on-chain services. Chainlink’s March 2025 post describes the conversion in four steps:
- Pay. Users pay with allowlisted tokens on the chain where the service runs. The first alternative asset was ETH and its wrapped version WETH, with more gas tokens and stablecoins planned.
- Consolidate. CCIP moves the fee tokens from the service chains to Ethereum at regular intervals. See Chainlink CCIP for how that transport works.
- Convert. On a periodic basis, Chainlink Automation swaps the pooled fee tokens to LINK on a decentralized exchange. The initial one is Uniswap V3. Price Feeds act as the reference price, so a swap can be reverted automatically if the pool price strays too far from the market-wide price.
- Deposit. The LINK goes into a Reserves contract, where allocations are earmarked for Chainlink Network service providers.
Two contracts with “reserve” in the name
Step 4 is where people get lost. Payment Abstraction has its own Reserves contract at 0x5680681ED3767B96914CE741a308155C7fB9171d. Chainlink describes it as the contract that receives the converted LINK, with earmarks that say how much LINK service providers can withdraw. The Chainlink Reserve at 0x9A70... is a separate address.
The two are linked on chain. On 7 November 2026 we called isServiceProviderAllowlisted on the Reserves contract. It returned true for the Chainlink Reserve and false for a control address. So the Chainlink Reserve receives LINK as an allowlisted service provider of the Payment Abstraction contract. All 67 weekly deposits described below were sent from the Reserves contract.
The Reserves contract itself held only 0.0407 LINK at block 26362589, and nothing was owed to service providers. LINK passes through it. It does not accumulate there.
Where the fees come from
Chainlink’s August 2025 post lists the current sources connected to Payment Abstraction:
- Enterprise integrations, usage and maintenance, paid off-chain.
- Usage-based payments, such as subscription services and per-call fees for CCIP.
- Revenue sharing. For SVR, Chainlink collects a share of recaptured liquidation MEV. The post gives the example of Aave, where it says Chainlink collects 35% of recaptured liquidation MEV on SVR-integrated markets. It also says GMX pays 1.2% of its total fees for low-latency market data. Chainlink SVR explains the recapture auction.
- The Build program, where early-stage projects commit part of their native token supply to Chainlink service providers in exchange for access to services.
The post adds that these payment structures may change and that other funding sources may be used in the future.
The only share Chainlink states for the Reserve is this one: 50% of fees from staking-secured SVR services, originally planned to cover oracle rewards paid to node operators, is now planned to help fund the Reserve through Payment Abstraction. No percentage is published for enterprise revenue or for usage-based fees. The March 2025 post had planned staking-secured SVR fees for stakers, and neither post says what happens to the other half after the change.
Payment Abstraction V2
Chainlink’s Q1 2026 review says Payment Abstraction V2 went through a Code4rena competitive audit and introduces a permissionless Dutch auction design for efficiency and lower execution costs. The audit contest ran from 18 to 27 March 2026.
Chainlink’s pages do not state whether V2 is live. The deposits we saw through 5 November 2026 still come from the original Reserves contract.
The contract is a timelock
The verified source at the Reserve address is not a custom vault. Sourcify has a full match for a generic RBACTimelock contract (solc 0.8.19), and the LINK simply sits in its balance. That fits Chainlink’s description of a multi-day timelock.
We read the settings on 7 November 2026 from a public endpoint:
- Delay.
getMinDelay()returned 172800 seconds, which is 2 days. Chainlink says “multi-day” and does not give a number, so the figure is our measurement. - Admin. The admin role has one member, the timelock itself.
- Proposer, canceller and bypasser. These roles are held by
ManyChainMultiSigcontracts, each with 22 signers. They are not Safe multisigs. We did not decode who the signers are, and we found no statement from Chainlink about it.
The code also contains an emergency path. Its own comments say the timelock can be bypassed by a bypasser or an admin in emergency situations, and that non-emergency actions are expected to follow the timelock. The delay itself can be changed through updateDelay, which only the admin may call, and the admin is the timelock contract itself, so a change has to be scheduled through the timelock or pushed through the bypass. Chainlink’s post does not mention the bypass role. This is how the contract is built, and it is why the 2 day figure is the current setting and not a guarantee.
On the outlook, Chainlink wrote: “We do not expect any withdrawals from the Reserve for multiple years.” The chain agrees so far. LINK Transfer logs up to block 26362560 show 98 transfers into the contract and one out of it. The one out came before the announcement: on 31 July 2025 an address sent the contract 1 LINK, and on 2 August 2025 the contract sent that 1 LINK back. Nothing has left since the Reserve was announced on 7 August 2025. The 98 transfers in, minus that 1 LINK, add up to the contract’s balance to the last wei.
What the deposits look like on chain
The first deposit from Payment Abstraction reached the Reserve on 7 August 2025: 1 LINK at 07:34 UTC, then 65,538.9 LINK at 10:14 UTC the same day.
Through 5 November 2026 we counted 67 deposits sent from the Payment Abstraction Reserves contract:
- Every one of the 67 landed on a Thursday (UTC).
- The median gap between them is 7 days, and after the first day they typically arrive between about 15:30 and 16:45 UTC.
- Amounts vary. The median deposit is about 94,268 LINK and the largest about 153,956 LINK.
The Thursday pattern is observed behaviour, not a schedule. Chainlink does not promise a deposit day or an amount, and we did not find who or what triggers each transfer.
Two example transactions, both a LINK Transfer from the Reserves contract to the Reserve:
- 14 August 2025, 44,109.76 LINK:
0x2f9bb6c7359644d66cee55c4702b535ecb71c43625404e107bd5ccf4921f90e9 - 5 November 2026, 94,523.58 LINK:
0x00abaa8af7b277b7ca996c8d0d3f77e81b4a6b516d2cddb22c7e0dfeffb3feb9
The other 31 transfers in came from 17 other addresses and add up to about 23.86 LINK, including the 1 LINK test transfer of 31 July 2025 that was sent back. Anyone can send tokens to a contract, so these say nothing about how the Reserve is funded.
How much LINK is in the Reserve
We read 6,569,599.73 LINK at Ethereum block 26362715 on 7 November 2026, at about 11:36 UTC. A second public endpoint returned the same raw value one block later. Chainlink publishes dated totals in its quarterly reviews:
| Reported in | Total in the Reserve |
|---|---|
| Chainlink Q1 2026 review | 3.06M LINK |
| Chainlink Q2 2026 review | 4.5M LINK |
| Chainlink Q3 2026 review (21 October 2026) | 6,047,498.3150 LINK |
| Our read, block 26362715 (7 November 2026) | 6,569,599.73 LINK |
The reviews do not say on which day each total was measured. On chain, the Q1 figure matches the balance after the deposit of 9 April 2026 (the Reserve held about 2.80M LINK at the end of March), and the Q3 figure matches the balance at the end of September to within 0.1 LINK. The dashboard at metrics.chain.link/reserve shows a running total.
Read the balance yourself
You need Node 18 or later for the built-in fetch. There are no dependencies. Save this as balance.mjs. It reads the LINK balanceOf the Reserve at the latest block through any Ethereum RPC URL:
// node balance.mjs <rpcUrl>
const RPC = process.argv[2];
const LINK = '0x514910771AF9Ca656af840dff83E8264EcF986CA';
const RESERVE = '0x9A709B7B69EA42D5eeb1ceBC48674C69E1569eC6';
const rpc = async (method, params) => {
const r = await fetch(RPC, { method: 'POST', headers: { 'content-type': 'application/json' }, body: JSON.stringify({ jsonrpc: '2.0', id: 1, method, params }) });
const j = await r.json(); if (j.error) throw new Error(JSON.stringify(j.error)); return j.result;
};
const block = await rpc('eth_blockNumber', []);
const data = '0x70a08231' + RESERVE.slice(2).toLowerCase().padStart(64, '0'); // balanceOf(address)
const raw = BigInt(await rpc('eth_call', [{ to: LINK, data }, block]));
const decimals = Number(BigInt(await rpc('eth_call', [{ to: LINK, data: '0x313ce567' }, block]))); // decimals()
const whole = raw / 10n ** BigInt(decimals), frac = (raw % 10n ** BigInt(decimals)).toString().padStart(decimals, '0').slice(0, 4);
console.log({ block: parseInt(block, 16), raw: raw.toString(), decimals, LINK: `${whole}.${frac}` });Run it with node balance.mjs https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com. On 7 November 2026 it printed this (Node spreads the object over several lines; it is shown on one here):
{ block: 26362715, raw: '6569599731730868900000000', decimals: 18, LINK: '6569599.7317' }The raw value has 18 decimals, so it is 6,569,599.7317 LINK. The script cuts the fraction to four digits rather than rounding. Your run will show a later block and, if deposits have continued, a larger number.
What the Reserve is not
- Not a buyback in Chainlink’s wording. The word comes from third-party headlines. Chainlink describes converting revenue into LINK and accumulating it.
- Not a payout. Chainlink does not describe any payout to token holders. The only stated stance on outflows is that it does not expect withdrawals for multiple years.
- Not staking rewards. Chainlink staking is a separate mechanism: staked LINK backs oracle services and can be slashed if performance requirements are not met. The two touch only through SVR fees, described above.
- Not Proof of Reserve. Chainlink Proof of Reserve is a different product that lets contracts verify the assets behind a token.
- Not the
Reservescontract. That is the earmark contract for service providers. The Chainlink Reserve is a separate contract that receives LINK from it. - Not on a fixed schedule. No deposit day or amount is promised.
Where it fits in Chainlink economics
Chainlink says the Reserve complements its existing economic pillars, which it describes as centered on user fee growth and operating cost reductions. Scale is the program through which blockchain ecosystems contribute resources to offset the integration, maintenance and operating costs of Chainlink services on their networks. The post’s disclaimer says revenue from enterprise integrations includes existing and historical revenue from Scale. Build, covered above, is the program for early-stage projects.
For the wider picture, see what is Chainlink and Chainlink products explained.
Sources & References
Pages were opened and on-chain values read on 7 November 2026.
- Chainlink, Introducing the Chainlink Reserve (7 August 2025)
- Chainlink, Payment Abstraction Is Now Live: SVR Fee Conversion and User Fee Staking Rewards (31 March 2025)
- Chainlink Economics
- Chainlink Staking
- Chainlink Documentation, LINK Token Contracts
- Chainlink Reserve dashboard
- Chainlink Quarterly Review Q1 2026
- Chainlink Quarterly Review Q2 2026
- Chainlink Quarterly Review Q3 2026
- Code4rena, Chainlink Payment Abstraction V2 audit
- GitHub, smartcontractkit/payment-abstraction
- Sourcify, verified source for contract 0x9A709B7B69EA42D5eeb1ceBC48674C69E1569eC6
- Ethereum mainnet reads, 7 November 2026: Chainlink Reserve
0x9A709B7B69EA42D5eeb1ceBC48674C69E1569eC6, Payment Abstraction Reserves0x5680681ED3767B96914CE741a308155C7fB9171d, LINK token0x514910771AF9Ca656af840dff83E8264EcF986CA. Balance read at block 26362715.
Work with Matrixed.Link
Matrixed.Link operates Chainlink oracle infrastructure, validator nodes and full-stack blockchain infrastructure for protocols and institutions that need institutional-grade reliability. Official Chainlink node operator running Data Feeds, CRE, SVR and Proof of Reserve. Matrixed.Link works under the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate of its parent company MatrixedLabs. AAA-rated provider on StakingRewards.
Contact Matrixed.Link to discuss Chainlink oracle infrastructure for your protocol.
