During the inaugural Ondo Summit in New York City, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Ripple CTO David Schwartz, Uniswap Labs COO Mary-Catherine (MC) Lader, and Blockdaemon CEO Konstantin Richter for a panel called “DeFi 2.0: Wall Street Meets Blockchain” moderated by Ondo Finance’s VP of Partnerships, Katie Wheeler.
“The TradFi community and the DeFi community are each other’s biggest customers,” Nazarov answered when asked if the relationship between DeFi and TradFi is moving toward collaboration or disruption.
“Net inflow of capital is what defines the growth of the crypto/blockchain industry,” he continued. Beyond the influx of value from speculative retail demand, his sights are on bringing the rest of the world’s value onchain.
“Where’s the rest? It’s where it’s always been – with the asset managers, the sovereign wealth funds, and the banks,” he said.
Nazarov highlighted tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) powered by Chainlink’s essential infrastructure as a significant factor driving TradFi’s blockchain adoption. Having enabled over $19 trillion in transaction value as the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink has become the preferred way for top financial institutions including the DTCC, Fidelity International and Sygnum to deliver key NAV and reserve data for products like tokenized funds onchain.
In Nazarov’s view, RWAs have the power to “reformat the public understanding” of the blockchain industry from “highly speculative” to “very legitimate.”
“So the average person goes from ‘Cryptocurrency is a scam’ to ‘Cryptocurrency is the new format for financial products that I want to deal with,’” he said.
Among the most exciting use cases for RWAs, Nazarov pointed to tokenizing low-risk assets such as U.S. Treasuries in order to diversify blockchain investments. RWAs also create new opportunities for fractionalized ownership of assets such as private equity and real estate.
On the horizon, he expects DeFi will innovate ways to generate yield from traditionally non-yield-bearing assets.
“Imagine you could get yield on your home equity, gold – that’s a financial innovation that would actually benefit people,” he said.
Watch the full panel.