During Sibos 2025, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with FinextraTV host Liam Xavier to discuss how blockchain standards for verifying and automating data and identity are bridging the gap between TradFi and DeFi to create a better, more efficient global financial system.
Among Chainlink’s major announcements at this year’s Sibos is a strategic partnership with Deutsche Börse to deliver multi-asset class market data onchain.
“Chainlink is very far along in integrating these different layers of existing systems and making them highly useful onchain,” Nazarov said.
He emphasized Chainlink’s compatibility with traditional financial pillars such as the ISO 20022 global financial messaging standard used by more than 11,000 banks in Swift’s network.
“The appearance of reliable standards onchain is one of the key building blocks that Chainlink provides to the whole blockchain ecosystem. Standards for how data works onchain, standards for cross-chain interoperability, standards for how identity is represented onchain, standards for how Swift messages and other commands are executed onchain – all of that is really critical to the next stage of our industry.”
The power of standards is efficiency at scale.
“If you don’t have people on a shared way to transact, on a shared way to define data, on a shared way to define identity in this onchain world, then everyone has to coordinate a lot every time they want to transact,” he said.
The universal adoption of Chainlink services such as its cross-chain identity framework (CCID) and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) streamlines how various entities across various chains verify critical information.
“Now, all those questions of how do we prove the value of the asset; how do we prove the identity of the people transacting; how do we move the asset between my chain and your chain – all those questions went from a big cost to no cost,” Nazarov explained.
Verified onchain identity then creates the ability to automate compliance.
“With that automation, you actually get a lot of efficiencies, and those efficiencies are really quite valuable because the traditional compliance model and method of compliance and process of compliance is really costly and time consuming.”
Nazarov said the goal of the new onchain model is to verify identity much faster and at scale.
“Instead of having to go through 10 months of aggregate onboarding across five institutions, you’re now at two months for the same five institutions. And then that scales massively – if instead of 10 institutions, you have 100 institutions or a thousand institutions utilizing that same level of verification.”
During Sibos, Chainlink also announced the second phase of an industry initiative with 24 global financial institutions to standardize corporate actions processing using oracles and AI.
Nazarov explained how standardizing corporate actions data onchain as a unified golden record solves costly inefficiencies and can reduce the need for manual human intervention from 75% to 5%.
“I think we’re entering an exciting world where you have a lot of critical information going onchain,” he said.
“Now you’ll have 24/7/365 markets. You’ll have those stablecoins and those tokenized funds trading in those markets. You’ll have 24/7/365 collateral management. You’ll have better corporate actions management. You’ll have better data quality. And all of these things are going to add up to a long list of benefits that make the digital asset version of something better than the TradFi version of it.”
Watch the full interview.