During CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025 in Toronto, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov delivered a keynote highlighting how Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) accelerates the convergence of TradFi and DeFi onchain.
CRE’s flexible, modular, chain-agnostic computing environment, which makes it faster and easier to build decentralized applications that are compatible with existing financial systems, is already being adopted by traditional financial institutions.
Chainlink, Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, and Ondo Finance recently announced the success of a cross-chain DvP test transaction powered by CRE. Brought to scale, the novel 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.
Nazarov believes CRE is key to bringing the world’s compliant capital onchain.
“If we want our industry to grow into its full potential, we need the compliant capital/institutional capital to come in, which, in my opinion, will grow the industry to over $100 trillion.”
CRE not only automates “the vast majority of compliance” required by traditional financial institutions; it coordinates complex multi-chain transactions involving many different datasets.
“You can take the ability to connect to a payment system; you can take the ability to connect to a data system; you can take the ability to connect to a chain; you can take the ability to connect to an identity system; and then you can synchronize all that with one piece of code, and that one piece of code will successfully run and operate that transaction for you,” Nazarov explained.
CRE allows institutions to create predefined, reusable, easily managed workflows that can be used to generate a variety of outcomes.
“We want the development lifecycle of an institutional transaction to go from a year or half a year down to a few weeks and down to a few days,” said Nazarov. “We want to accelerate the rate at which institutional capital can interact with things onchain.”
He said the settlement of Ondo Finance’s tokenized U.S. Treasuries fund with J.P. Morgan’s permissioned Kinexys Digital Payments network on Ondo Chain demonstrates how CRE can bring onchain finance to new heights.
“What’s going to take the industry to the next level is the ability to build these complex transactions for trillions and trillions of dollars to start transacting and flowing into our industry,” he explained.
“The future looks like the user bases of large institutions within those big institutional chains and those big institutional systems being able to utilize all the high-quality financial products that get made on public chains.”
Watch the full keynote address.