Last week at ETHDenver, Chainlink Labs’ Product Marketing Manager, Michael Robinson, delivered a presentation on how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks the full potential of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) throughout global finance. In a follow-up discussion, Robinson and Circle’s Senior Business Development Manager, Shamus Noonan, explored the opportunities created by moving USDC cross-chain with CCIP.
“At the end of the day, if anything can be tokenized, it will be tokenized,” Robinson told ETHDenver attendees. “Anything tokenized onchain is represented in a superior way.”
This, he explained, is because tokenized assets inherit blockchain’s security and transparency while conferring opportunities for fractionalization and programmability, reducing transaction time and cost, and opening up global markets for both legacy and innovative new financial products.
“This is the biggest market opportunity in human history ever,” Robinson said, highlighting expert predictions for the tokenized RWA market to reach $16 trillion by 2030 – a small fraction of RWAs’ overall market opportunity according to a 2021 World Economic Forum report on nearly $867 trillion in global value that could ultimately be brought onchain.
As the web3 industry’s cross-chain communication standard, CCIP achieves the highest level of cross-chain security and features a separate Risk Management Network that continuously surveils cross-chain functions for erroneous activity. By allowing stablecoins and RWAs to flow seamlessly between chains, CCIP eliminates liquidity silos and democratizes access to onchain financial products. CCIP can also programmatically transfer tokenized assets with instructions for use on the destination chain.
CCIP supports the secure and reliable cross-chain transfer of USDC, Circle’s USD-pegged stablecoin with an almost $30 billion market cap, allowing developers throughout Chainlink’s vast ecosystem to build advanced cross-chain DeFi applications. Noonan, who leads Circle’s blockchain partnerships, joined Robinson onstage to talk about how the collaboration with Chainlink Labs is built around “synergies and shared goals” for expanding web3’s utility.
“We want to have a world where users don’t even have to think about security or anything like that; they can just move their USDC from one chain to another and not have to worry about hacks or exploits,” Noonan explained.
“Especially for all of the web2 developers – we’re hearing so much from them saying, ‘Hey these are requirements that we have in our web2 apps we need in the web3 landscape.’ And I would say both of our companies have really taken it to heart and are trying our best to make that a reality.”
With infrastructure like CCIP accelerating new use cases for RWAs and stablecoins like USDC’s digital dollar, Noonan noted that tokenized assets were “definitely the buzzwords” of this year’s ETHDenver. “Tokenizing an asset inherently opens it up – it’s open, it’s permissionless, and it’s borderless – and that’s what we’re really excited about,” he said.
Watch Michael Robinson’s full presentation and conversation with Shamus Noonan.