This week, Chainlink Labs’ Chief Business Officer, Johann Eid, joined DeFi Dad and Nomatic on The Edge Podcast to discuss a range of topics such as how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is building a secure foundation for onchain finance.
Eid explained why emerging industries like prediction markets and AI also need Chainlink to thrive.
Prediction markets are one of the fastest-growing sectors in global finance, projected to reach $1 trillion in annual trading volume by 2030. Polymarket, Myriad, Jupiter Exchange, Kalshi, and ADI Predictstreet, the official prediction market partner of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, all leverage Chainlink’s secure-by-default oracle infrastructure including Data Streams, Automation, and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE).
Eid said prediction markets are naturally one of Chainlink’s big use cases.
“Prediction markets cannot exist if you don’t know what has happened and Chainlink has been building the infrastructure to say ‘that’s what happened’ for the last seven years,” he explained.
“It’s a big focus for us and a lot of the market is moving to this type of resolution through decentralized oracles.”
When it comes to AI, Eid believes transparency is crucial.
“I’m surely not going to give an AI agent my money if they’re not going to be transparent with me. Transparency is a key use case we’ve been focused on and that requires Chainlink.”
Research reveals AI models make things up or “hallucinate” because their training algorithms reward confident guessing. Instead of admitting uncertainty, models use statistical patterns to generate answers that sound plausible but are actually fabricated.
“When AI doesn’t know something, it doesn’t tell you it doesn’t know it,” Eid said.
“The AI knows everything, even when it doesn’t. There is a name for that. It’s called the yes man. And guess what? Yes men – they’re not people you give your money to.”
While he expects transactions will be performed through AI agents in the future, the industry has serious philosophical questions to answer first.
“What is the use case they want to focus on? Do they want a yes man or do they want someone who can become a capital allocator?”
Virtuals Protocol, an economic operating layer for autonomous AI agents, recently joined numerous top protocols with a combined TVL of over $7.2 billion to adopt CCIP, which meets institutional standards for tokenizing real-world assets onchain. In a post on X, Eid emphasized why the agentic economy must be built onchain with Chainlink’s secure infrastructure.
“The reason crypto was created was to bring transparency to the world, and now, with the rise of AI, with the rise of so many new technologies, the transparency topic has never been so important,” he said.
“Are you bullish on electricity? That’s basically what we are. We’re literally the electricity of the whole space. I think the impact we’re bringing to the world is bigger than anything else, including AI.”
Watch the full episode.