During Consensus 2025, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino to discuss how traditional financial institutions can securely and efficiently enter the blockchain industry via Chainlink’s essential infrastructure.
The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) is a flexible, modular, chain-agnostic computing environment that makes it faster and easier to build decentralized applications that are compatible with existing financial systems. During his Consensus keynote, Nazarov explained why CRE is key to bringing compliant capital onchain.
Chainlink, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, and Ondo Finance recently announced the success of a cross-chain DvP test transaction powered end-to-end by CRE. Brought to scale, this onchain DvP solution could reduce counterparty and settlement risk from system fragmentation and manual workflows that cost market participants more than $914 billion over the past decade.
“A transaction within the public chain world of DeFi or just basic token ownership can be anywhere from two to five steps,” Nazarov told Malandrino. “But in capital markets, it’ll be well beyond 10 to 20 steps for the transaction to actually happen. What the CRE does is provide a single environment where you can write a single piece of code to manage all of that complexity.”
Nazarov has spent much of the year in D.C. speaking with lawmakers and even addressing the President about how the U.S. can become a global leader in onchain finance and digital asset adoption. World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the DeFi protocol backed by President Trump, recently integrated Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to expand access to its institutional-grade stablecoin, USD1.
“I think that the pendulum has swung completely in the other direction,” Nazarov told Malandrino. “Things were very negative before and now they’re extremely positive.”
Beyond enabling cross-chain capabilities with CCIP, Nazarov said Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve (PoR) is vital to creating a better global financial system onchain.
“Proof of Reserve takes the problem of auditing and it automates it,” he explained. “So the audit cycle goes from a year or a quarter down to a second – and you really can’t, in my opinion, commit too much fraud in a second.”
He believes the future of crypto will ultimately be defined by tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) created by traditional financial institutions.
“Those asset classes onchain will eclipse the total value of cryptocurrency,” he explained. “That’s the new liquidity.”
He said Chainlink is focused on streamlining the process as much as possible.
“If the cost of generating those assets drops low enough, then I think you have this inflection point where everyone starts doing it because it’s a good economic proposition.”
Watch the full interview.