This week, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Johny Fernandez on FINTECH.TV to talk about Chainlink’s latest work with major global financial players like the DTCC and what this means for the industry heading into 2027.
DTCC is the primary financial market infrastructure for U.S. capital markets, settling and clearing $20 trillion or two-thirds of the U.S. GDP every day. In May, DTCC announced its Collateral AppChain, a shared blockchain infrastructure designed to streamline near-real-time movement, valuation, and settlement of tokenized collateral across global markets.
Slated to go live in Q1 2027, AppChain leverages Chainlink’s data standard and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts and bringing hundreds of trillions in tokenized assets onchain.
The DTCC Tokenization Service, which allows eligible Depository Trust Company (DTC) participants to tokenize “digital twins” of real-world assets, officially launched last week. DTCC’s tokenized equities possess the same legal rights and investor protections as traditional securities held in custody by the DTC, while offering superior yield, 24/7 movement, and better balance sheet management.
“There are huge advantages to operating in the 24/7 way,” Nazarov said. “The DTCC recognizes that and the financial markets in the U.S. are recognizing that – even ahead of other global markets – and that’s what we’re helping enable with our technology.”
He explained how Chainlink is building infrastructure that puts hundreds of billions in idle institutional capital to work.
“The shift to 24/7 and highly interconnected systems where collateral and equities can be managed, and hosted, and gain yield from different sources 24/7 is a huge shift that is going to change a lot about the financial markets.”
During Link:NYC, Chainlink launched Chainlink 24/7, which delivers around-the-clock pricing data for stocks, commodities, and other traditional assets, extending market coverage to weekends and holidays. The solution is designed to facilitate continuous trading, lending, and risk management for tokenized real-world assets across blockchain networks.
“Interoperability and data working together gives rise to 24/7 markets,” said Nazarov.
He emphasized 24/7 markets are not just about trading; they’re also about the utility in all the venues around trading, such as lending and collateral management.
“All these key operations need to happen around the trading activity in order for it to really become a 24/7 true market and ecosystem, and that is exactly what we’re enabling now.”
As the only oracle platform to achieve ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 attestation, Chainlink is being utilized by the world’s largest financial institutions, including Swift, Euroclear, UBS, Wellington Management, ANZ, and Fidelity International, to bring capital markets onchain. After a LayerZero exploit resulted in nearly $300 million in losses across DeFi this year, numerous protocols, representing a combined TVL over $15 billion, adopted Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Nazarov believes the industry-wide migration to Chainlink will be accelerated by AI.
“AI is really driving a lot of discovery of different exploits and hacks that were previously not discovered. It’s enabling adversaries to do more with less and to cover a wider array of the surface area of an application.”
Looking ahead to 2027, he sees institutional adoption of tokenization and onchain finance moving closer toward critical mass.
“A whole bunch of folks now have ledgers, the way we predicted they would. All of these ledgers and chains need to get connected to each other, and we’re the one everyone goes to for that. They all need data, and we’re the one everyone goes to for that. We know all the folks that are on track to go to production and it really is a critical mass.”