During last week’s Singapore FinTech Festival, Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov virtually joined Nasdaq’s TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino to discuss DeFi’s accelerating growth, Chainlink’s rapidly increasing total value secured (TVS), and the emergence of cross-chain smart contracts.
The conversation summed up 2021’s key achievements and pointed toward the future of Chainlink-powered DeFi in 2022.
DeFi’s Growth Acceleration
Of the factors driving DeFi adoption, Nazarov said inflation and yield are most compelling. In his view, as more users adopt cryptocurrency as a digital inflation hedge, more users will want to participate in DeFi for its superior yield compared to returns offered by traditional banks.
“The benefits of getting into cryptocurrency have really never been larger, and the benefits of and returns from DeFi are just accelerating the entire dynamic because people can not only protect themselves from inflation but get a very large return,” Nazarov explained.
Chainlink’s Rising TVS
When asked how Chainlink grew its TVS from $7 billion to over $75 billion in less than a year, Nazarov highlighted Chainlink’s pivotal contribution to the emergence of DeFi. Having launched hundreds of decentralized oracle networks that power top DeFi protocols across vital sectors like lending and derivatives, Chainlink’s TVS follows the expansion of those protocols and the entire DeFi space.
“As DeFi has grown, so has the value we secure,” Nazarov said.
Chainlink announced its $75 billion TVS less than two weeks ago; that number has since surpassed $83 billion.
Chainlink is now securing significant value across other verticals such as blockchain-based gaming, dynamic NFTs, and decentralized insurance. Novel data feeds, such as the Associated Press’ elections, economic, sports and business data, and new decentralized services, such as Keepers, are creating entirely new use cases for increasingly sophisticated smart contracts.
Emergence Of Cross-Chain Smart Contracts
As users put more pressure on banks and fintechs to provide access to digital currencies and DeFi, Nazarov anticipates the emergence of cross-chain smart contracts will open a new world of opportunity.
Cross-chain smart contracts are enabled by Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) which is already attracting top CeFi platforms, such as Celsius, that want access to multi-chain DeFi integration, as well as leading DeFi protocols that want to leverage each other to power a multi-chain world.
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full conversation with Jill Malandrino on Nasdaq’s TradeTalks.