In a recent video, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov reflected on his travels throughout Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and Washington, D.C. over the past year with an optimistic view of Chainlink’s progress toward bringing capital markets onchain.
“We’re in various stages of conversations with probably all the top institutions in those geographies,” he said.
“Those top institutions want to use the solution that solves all their problems, is used by the other top-tier banks and players, has all the functionality they want – whether that’s identity, data, connectivity, orchestration – and there really is no system other than Chainlink that meets that high standard.”
Nazarov said the outlook is so positive that Chainlink has seen a shift from outbound to inbound interest, especially since launching the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) – a modular, chain-agnostic computing platform that makes it faster and easier to build DeFi applications compatible with existing financial systems.
He described two main challenges Chainlink aims to solve. The first is ensuring the system can scalably meet the demands of asset managers, banks, and financial market infrastructures around the world. The second is providing a single global standard for the world’s top institutions to interact with each other across different chains, jurisdictions, and compliance requirements.
“You can be a Swiss bank like UBS and be able to transact with an Australian bank like ANZ using a tokenized fund from a U.S. institution – and all of that can seamlessly flow across multiple chains, interacting with multiple pieces of data, complying with multiple different regulatory regimes – that’s what we’re stitching together,” he explained.
The next step is enabling capital to flow from traditional finance to DeFi through what Nazarov envisions as a global internet of contracts. The tokenization of real-world assets, for which Chainlink provides the most widely adopted set of protocols, accelerates this trend.
“I genuinely think that we will be able to stitch together the largest collection of institutions with the most capital transacting with each other on production, and therefore the largest source of capital flows into the DeFi ecosystem,” he said.
“That’s the global standard we’re building.”
Watch the full video.