SmartCon 2025 featured presentations from more than 100 web3 pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the theme,“From Crypto to Capitol Hill.” To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion.
Stani Kulechov is Founder of Aave Labs, the key contributor to Aave. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and embedded DeFi’s trillion-dollar opportunity.
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.
Kulechov said DeFi has proven its resiliency; the next phase is integrating DeFi into fintechs and traditional finance as embedded DeFi.
“DeFi is essentially replacing the back-ends of banks,” he explained. “Banks will start to think about decentralized finance as an infrastructure empowering tokenized assets.”
Horizon is unlocking onchain utility for money market funds, credit funds, and tokenized funds such as VBILL, the first tokenized fund from global asset manager VanEck. During SmartCon, leading tokenization platform Securitize adopted the Chainlink data standard to price VBILL on Horizon.
“Working with institutions on asset tokenization and enabling these assets to become collaterals, being able to borrow against and creating more liquidity – that’s the way to get there,” Kulechov explained. “What we’re doing now is taking what really works in DeFi as an infrastructure and applying that to these traditional assets.”
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 $27 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink provides essential data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards to power advanced blockchain use cases for institutional RWAs.
“Without the data, we can’t use these assets as collateral within DeFi, so that’s where Aave and Chainlink are collaborating,” said Kulechov. “We have to figure out how to price them during weekends and outside of trading hours, because DeFi and onchain is a 24/7 industry.”
Over time, he anticipates smart contracts and automization will reduce operational costs and maximize transparency to everyone’s benefit.
“I’m expecting the tokenized asset space to grow into a trillion-dollar industry in the coming years. Once we get there, being able to plug DeFi into these assets enables more utility, more operational efficiency, and also – for the end users and the public – more transparency.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Stani Kulechov.