SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Angie Walker is Global Head of Banking and Capital Markets at Chainlink Labs, the primary contributor to Chainlink’s industry-standard decentralized computing platform. Walker sat down with Malandrino to discuss how Chainlink’s critical web3 services are facilitating some of the most exciting blockchain use cases throughout Asia.
She described an “extremely vibrant and very innovative” landscape where regulatory asymmetry and fragmentation “create a lot of competitive opportunity” between various markets.
“There are some really exciting projects in the region at the moment and we’re very excited to have such a diverse range of opportunities for Chainlink and for our products and services,” she said.
Chainlink plays a significant role in numerous innovative use cases emerging from Project Guardian – a multi-year collaboration between policymakers and the financial industry to enhance financial markets’ liquidity and efficiency through asset tokenization – which is run by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
Chainlink provides a comprehensive suite of services that are essential for creating and securing tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and stablecoins throughout the multi-chain economy. Proof of Reserve (PoR) and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), for example, will support the forthcoming HKDA stablecoin, which is backed 1:1 by the Hong Kong dollar.
“There’s quite a lot of stablecoin licensing, which is super important for things like cross-border payments,” Walker said.
Recently, Chainlink launched critical new privacy capabilities for CCIP. Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), one of the largest banks in the Asia-Pacific region with over 1.1 trillion AUD in assets, will be the first major institution to pilot CCIP Private Transactions for cross-chain settlement of tokenized RWAs under Project Guardian.
“Privacy is super important,” Walker said. She outlined three levels of privacy that must be maintained in onchain financial transactions: privacy of the participants; privacy of participants’ data; and privacy of the transaction itself.
“What we have to be able to do is to make sure that at no point is the exposure of that transaction to a broader audience likely to have a market impact,” she explained.
“We’ve been working hard on all three, and they’re all addressed through our privacy manager technology, which we hope will really make the use of chains very much fit for purpose now within regulated capital markets.”
After privacy, interoperability is key to facilitating cross-border payments throughout Asia and ultimately worldwide.
“The big question on the lips of most people within banking and capital markets at the moment is interoperability,” Walker said. She underscored CCIP’s capacity to link regionally siloed assets and services together.
“We can get a frictionless movement of these workflows between chains and between different ecosystems,” she explained. “It’s not about the minimum viable product; it’s about the minimum viable ecosystem.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Angie Walker.