At SmartCon 2023, Chainlink Labs Chief Business Officer Johann Eid delivered a powerful keynote examining the history of money and the significance of being able to cryptographically guarantee financial assets for the first time with Chainlink’s web3 infrastructure.
“A good way to understand the word is to look at money,” Eid said. “Money tells us things about our past, our present, and it can help us understand what it has in store for us in the future.”
Recalling his recent trip to Lebanon, where consumers face triple-digit inflation, Eid said the future of money looks “bleak” if nothing changes. The problem, in his view, dates back to the dawn of civilization: “non-verifiable” systems controlled by a select few who have “zero accountability around their actions.”
“That’s a common thing throughout history,” he said, highlighting examples from the fall of the Roman Empire to the collapse of FTX. “It’s a never-ending cycle.”
He continued, “People give huge amounts of power to a few who have non-verifiable systems that make them unaccountable for any of their actions and this type of paradigm destroys countries, societies, civilizations, and it set back our industry a few years.”
Eid views blockchain technology as humanity’s long-awaited solution to mistrust and manipulation. “Blockchain is enforced verifiability,” he said. “Blockchain ensures that whenever someone relies on a system, they know the rules of the game.”
He underscored the uniqueness of this opportunity.
“You’re the first people in history who can transact from one place to another without any third party who can take your money and who can basically make you lose everything,” he told the audience. “What this means for us is creating systems, countries, societies, civilizations that last hundreds of years. That’s how you leave marble instead of leaving clay to future generations.”
He detailed how Chainlink’s suite of web3 services unlocks the full potential of cryptographically guaranteed assets. Proof of Reserve programmatically ensures tokenized assets are fully backed by onchain or offchain “real-world” reserves; Data Streams continuously updates onchain assets with millisecond-latency market data; and CCIP allows tokenized assets to flow freely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications.
Eid said combining these three technologies facilitates a new and better world.
“Tokenization, a few years ago, used to be a dream that a few utopists would have. People were dreaming about it; Chainlink was actually building the tools to make it happen.”
He predicted the tokenized asset space will continue to accelerate with these tools in place.
“We went from one tokenization use case a few years ago, to one every month, to one every few weeks and now we’re seeing one every day,” he said. “What we think will happen will be one new token will be issued every minute, every second, until the word is fully tokenized.”
Watch Johann Eid’s full keynote.