In an interview with TheStreet Roundtable’s Alp Gasimov, Chainlink Labs’ Chief Business Officer, Johann Eid, reflected on the industry’s migration toward Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) on the cusp of DeFi’s long-awaited merge with traditional finance.
“We’re at a very important point in crypto and DeFi history,” he said.
“We’ve never been closer to actually getting to our end state, which is tokenizing the world.”
Decentralized infrastructure that meets institutional security standards is the foundation for tokenizing real-world assets onchain.
“Every single institution is talking about tokenization,” Eid said. “We need our infrastructure across the space to be compliant with the standards these folks will need to embrace our space.”
Following last month’s LayerZero exploit, which resulted in nearly $300 million in losses, top DeFi protocols with a combined TVL of more than $4 billion have migrated from legacy, ad hoc bridge infrastructure to CCIP. Eid expects many more to follow.
Chainlink’s node architecture establishes security by default. Compared to bridge solutions with only one or two centrally controlled nodes, each CCIP bridge lane is secured by 16 independent, security-reviewed node operators, ensuring every cross-chain transaction is redundantly validated.
“The simple observation is that the infra you build on is extremely important. If you’re building on infra that can be hacked when one single person or system is compromised, you put hundreds of millions at risk. That’s the reality of our space. That’s why our space, since the very beginning, was built on decentralization.”
Eid believes the industry’s primary focus should be fortifying the framework for a better financial system.
“These hacks – it’s better that they’re happening today than in six to twelve months when these institutions are fully onchain. I think it’s giving us an opportunity to really rethink how we’ve been building many of the different things within our space.”
Because Chainlink is the only oracle platform with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 attestation, it is already being adopted by the world’s largest financial institutions, including Swift, Euroclear, UBS, Wellington Management, ANZ, and Fidelity International, to bring capital markets onchain.
“If you want the next big fintech apps to be built onchain, the developers building these apps shouldn’t have to spend 50% of their time worrying about security,” Eid said.
“There will be a direct correlation between Chainlink products and Chainlink adoption and security within the space.”