Last month, U.S. regulators approved spot bitcoin ETFs in what industry leaders including Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov called a watershed moment for crypto. This week, bitcoin surged toward its all-time high and crypto ETF issuer 21Shares announced its integration of Chainlink Proof of Reserve (PoR) to boost the transparency of bitcoin reserves backing ARKB, a leading spot bitcoin ETF with over $1.58 billion in net assets.
Yesterday, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Tanvir Gill on CNBC’s Street Signs Asia to discuss how bitcoin ETFs supported by Chainlink’s industry-leading decentralized oracle infrastructure are broadening cryptocurrency access and expanding use cases for tokenization.
“I think the bitcoin ETF is definitely kicking open an entirely new door for the global financial system and all the asset managers and banks and everyone that is used to traditional methods of gaining access to assets to get into the crypto/blockchain world,” he said.
As the industry-leading decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has delivered over 11.8 billion data points and enabled more than $9.7 trillion in transaction value onchain while providing a comprehensive set of services that are critical for creating and securing digital, cross-chain, and tokenized real-world assets on the path toward scaling onchain finance to billions of global users.
“There’s a much larger market still to come into the entire cryptocurrency industry in this way,” Nazarov said. “I also see a lot of adoption by banks for tokenization of real-world assets, which is where Chainlink plays a big role in enabling them to do that.”
PoR creates a new standard of transparency and reliability for crypto ETFs by leveraging Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure to provide near-real-time onchain updates for reserves backing digital assets. As demonstrated by Swift’s proof of concept, Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) empowers traditional financial institutions like Euroclear and ANZ to create tokenized assets and financial products that can flow freely between private and public blockchains.
With Wall Street giants such as BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale spearheading bitcoin ETFs, Nazarov said digital assets are here to stay and tokenization is just beginning.
“I think the legitimacy of the top asset managers in the world giving the market access to a financial product means that bitcoin and cryptocurrency has reached a certain state of being an inevitable asset class,” he said.
“I think that there’s a very big market for real-world asset tokenization, which is what banks have a lot of and asset managers have big appetite for. I think what that’s going to do is it’s going to drive a blockchain adoption trend and blockchain adoption generally also drives cryptocurrency value, cryptocurrency adoption. And it’s in that tokenization trend where Chainlink and other key technologies come into play.”