On stage during Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Germany, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov delivered a keynote address followed by a conversation with Nadine Chakar, Global Head of Digital Assets at DTCC, a leading financial market infrastructure (FMI) which settles upwards of $4 quadrillion in transaction volume each year.
Nazarov and Chakar discussed the recently completed second phase of Chainlink’s industry initiative to standardize corporate actions processing using oracles and AI. 24 of the world’s largest financial services institutions, including DTCC, Swift, and Euroclear, collaborated on a production-grade deployment capable of saving the global financial industry an estimated $58 billion in annual processing costs with minimal disruption to existing processes.
Chakar described this initiative as “the first glimmer” in a decades-long search for a method of automating and consolidating corporate actions data.
“We’re not yet at a stage where you can set and forget it, but the blockchain, smart contracts, and oracles have given us a path – a better shot than we’ve ever had.”
Standardizing corporate actions data onchain as a unified golden record solves costly inefficiencies stemming from inconsistencies in structure, format, terminology, timeline, medium, and standards for dissemination.
The system uses the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) to validate AI model outputs and transform them into ISO 20022-compliant messages that are transmitted to the Swift network. Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) relays the same data across multiple private and public blockchains.
Chakar said collaboration between the blockchain industry-standard oracle network and TradFi leaders such as DTCC is crucial to building onchain solutions that synchronize with legacy systems. This “hybrid world” allows TradFi to properly integrate blockchain technology and tokenized real-world assets into established workflows and risk-assessment processes.
“We’ve chosen the hard road purposely. We’ve chosen to do this right. We’ve chosen to bring corporate actions onchain. And we can’t do this alone. We need our participants to help us get there. We need partners like Chainlink to help us get there.”
“It’s a kind of merging,” Nazarov agreed. “It’s not one of them replacing the other.”
“What we’re aspiring to do is to provide the same level of products and service and security to the new infrastructure as we do to the old,” Chakar explained. “By having that harmonization come together, you’re going to put more confidence in the system.”
She emphasized the need to reinforce blockchain’s deterministic code with established intermediaries.
“We’re still far away from trusting blindly,” she said. “What we have here today though is an immense and really important step.”
Commending Chainlink for working to solve “one of the hardest problems in lifecycle management,” Chakar sees a solution on the horizon.
“We’ll get there. I’m confident of that, but it’s going to take us a bit of time.”
Watch the entire presentation.