During SmartCon 2025, Aave Founder Stani Kulechov sat down with Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and Altcoin Daily host Aaron Arnold to discuss how Aave and Chainlink are powering the next wave of DeFi’s institutional adoption.
Chainlink is the industry-standard oracle platform connecting capital markets to blockchain and securing the vast majority – nearly $100 billion – of DeFi. Having enabled over $26 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink provides essential data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards needed to power advanced blockchain use cases for institutional tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), lending, payments, and stablecoins.
Aave is the leading DeFi protocol with over $50 billion in net deposits. In August, Aave Labs launched Horizon, an institutional platform enabling compliant stablecoin borrowing against tokenized RWAs, which has since surpassed $500 million in deposits as the fastest-growing platform for RWA-backed loans.
To power onchain institutional lending at scale, Horizon adopted Chainlink’s SmartData asset suite, beginning with NAVLink to automate delivery of accurate net asset value (NAV) data for tokenized RWA collateral directly onchain. Yesterday, leading tokenization platform Securitize adopted the Chainlink data standard to price VBILL, the first tokenized fund from global asset manager VanEck, on Horizon.
Nazarov described institutions as the conduit through which hundreds of trillions of dollars flow onchain.
“I think the only way that happens is that all the world’s institutions have a clear and simple way to adopt, and a good reason to adopt DeFi.”
Kulechov underscored his longtime belief that the automatization, transparency, and noncustodial features of DeFi will lead to the creation of superior financial products.
“Down the line, the biggest growing asset base will be traditional assets that are currently in the existing banking rails, that could actually benefit from decentralized finance,” he said.
“The way that they benefit is to have market opportunity. If you have a market opportunity to collateralize these assets, borrow against them – that creates utility, and by using smart contracts you can get better efficiency.”
Ultimately, he explained, “Institutions are important because they are essentially the distributors of DeFi.”
Nazarov described Aave and Chainlink as two vital components of recreating traditional finance with better transparency onchain.
“What you’ve really done with the DeFi ecosystem is you’ve pulled apart a financial institution where everything would opaquely be in one entity and no one would understand how the conditions are made,” he explained.
“The real guarantee of DeFi is that the standards for how these contracts work and how these oracles work are very high. And there are teams that openly and publicly set those standards. Aave’s team sets the standards for how the markets work. Chainlink sets the standards for how the oracle infrastructure works. So everyone can look in and understand how the system works as a whole.”
“Horizon is a great way to package something that we all love in DeFi at the moment into something that is really usable for traditional financial institutions as more of these assets are coming onchain,” Kulechov explained.
“We’re going to see asset classes that we never have been able to tap into or even imagine. And that’s going to be a big part of the unlock.”
Nazarov highlighted Chainlink’s ongoing work to meet the numerous conditions required for large amounts of institutional capital to move onchain.
“We really see a very bright future, where those institutions and the clients of those institutions are going to want to put their capital into Horizon because of the superior yield, the superior transparency, the superior reduction of risk. I think that’s just going to be the way of the world.”
Kulechov agreed. “I just have one thing to say and that’s DeFi will win.”
Watch the full conversation.