During a fireside chat at Web 3.0 Unleashed earlier this year, Chainlink Labs Chief Product Officer Kemal El Moujahid said Chainlink gives developers superpowers to build web3.
Drawing on his experience launching Facebook Messenger, now used by 40 million businesses to reach over a billion consumers, and scaling Google’s TensorFlow into the world’s top open-source machine learning platform, El Moujahid said the paradigm shift to web3 systems powered by Chainlink’s decentralized services is an inevitability, “because builders can build it and consumers will demand it.”
During a Q&A with the Chainlink community following the publication of Chainlink’s Q2 2023 Product Update, El Moujahid detailed how Chainlink’s platform is focused on engineering solutions to developers’ most pressing problems with an unparalleled focus on security.
He elaborated on how this approach continues to inform the development and deployment of critical infrastructure like Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), a universal standard for traditional financial institutions to transact with multiple private and public blockchains.
“We’ve made great progress this quarter, and thanks to that progress, CCIP is on track and planned for mainnet early access to occur this summer,” El Moujahid said, pointing to Chainlink’s most recent collaboration with global financial messaging provider, Swift, to test CCIP with a dozen major financial institutions.
“Testing with early users has already shown great results, but we want to make sure we ensure that the transition to mainnet is smooth,” he continued, describing a gradual onboarding process aimed at general mainnet availability later this year.
“Our principle is to focus on execution, because we know there are high expectations around Chainlink,” he said. “As always, we remain heads down so that we can come back to our community with tangible results, because at the end of the day, only results count.”
Acknowledging the past year as “a challenging time in crypto,” El Moujahid reemphasized Chainlink’s long-term vision for the future.
“What I learned from my time at Facebook and Google building TensorFlow is that anything worth building takes time,” he said. “What matters in the long run is having the right vision, strong fundamentals, the right team, and I definitely see that here.”
He highlighted a record number of project submissions at Chainlink’s Spring 2023 Hackathon, as well as ongoing institutional adoption of tokenized assets and on-chain finance. “These are important indicators of the role Chainlink will play as web3 grows, in orders of magnitude,” he said.
Listen to the complete Q&A.