SmartCon 2025 featured presentations from more than 100 web3 pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the theme,“From Crypto to Capitol Hill.” To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion.
Johann Eid is Chief Business Officer of Chainlink Labs, the primary contributing developer of Chainlink. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss the most important DeFi developments in 2025 and the path to DeFi’s broad adoption.
Eid said this year’s SmartCon highlighted how close the DeFi industry is to becoming a mainstay of everyday life for people and economies around the world.
“You now have TradFi institutions coming to crypto conferences. You have the government getting on board with crypto. We’re seeing new tokenized assets come from asset managers in the TradFi world on a day-to-day basis. I think we’re closer now than ever, and not only are we close – we’re actually right in the middle of this shift happening.”
Eid believes the launch of Aave’s Horizon, an institutional platform enabling compliant stablecoin borrowing against tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), was a watershed moment for industry.
To power onchain institutional lending at scale, Horizon is adopting Chainlink’s SmartData asset suite, beginning with NAVLink to automate delivery of accurate NAV data for tokenized RWA collateral directly onchain. Horizon’s broader Chainlink integration strategy includes plans to adopt Proof of Reserve for transparent reserve verification and SmartAUM for granular asset composition tracking.
“After issuing a tokenized asset, you need utility,” Eid explained. “Horizon brings this utility onchain and we’re very glad to be partnering with them to ensure they can have all the data, all the cross-chain, and all the proof of reserve needed to make this connection happen.”
Chainlink’s highly resilient oracle infrastructure has facilitated over $27 trillion in transaction value. Eid said Chainlink’s unique ability to withstand black swan events like October’s AWS outage makes it a clear choice for safeguarding institutional capital.
“TradFi institutions are not going to be using a solution that goes down or that misprices their assets. Chainlink was fine three weeks ago. It was fine one month ago during the flash crash, and because of that, we’re appearing more and more as the key solution to enable tokenization to happen for these TradFi players.”
Beyond its security and reliability, Chainlink offers a comprehensive cross-chain platform connecting onchain financial products to critical offchain data.
“It’s basically every single connection the space needs. We bring it and we bring it in a safe and secure manner.”
Moving forward, the focus is on building infrastructure that can accommodate trillions of dollars.
“DeFi today is a PoC of a few hundred billion dollars, because the main assets we have in DeFi are still crypto assets. The main goal now is to get these crypto assets to become tokenized equities, tokenized stocks, tokenized ETFs. That’s when we go from a few hundred billion to trillions of dollars.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Johann Eid.