To kick off the new year, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and Aave Labs CEO Stani Kulechov joined Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino to reflect on blockchain’s biggest breakthroughs in 2024 and anticipate significant advancements the industry could see in 2025.
Nazarov highlighted Chainlink’s continued success in securing DeFi with over $18 trillion in transaction value enabled; the ongoing adoption of Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as the canonical cross-chain infrastructure of top blockchains such as Ronin; and the launch of Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), which utilizes advanced cryptographic tools to streamline the creation of cutting-edge cross-chain applications.
“Chainlink as a community is solidifying itself as a standard in the capital markets,” he said. “That same set of standards for how the DeFi world works will actually allow us to start merging the DeFi world and the capital markets/TradFi world into one big global blockchain economy.”
Standing at $34 billion in net deposits and with over 200 DAO proposals in 2024, Aave has reinforced itself as the leading Ethereum DeFi protocol after what Kulechov called “a really big year.”
“The growth has been very much driven by this whole concept of a DeFi renaissance, where we see these decentralized organizations are able to create a piece of infrastructure that has high utility for users on the blockchain,” he explained.
As the community builds subsequent versions of Aave v3, Kulechov said the focus is increasing capital efficiency, risk management, and granularity for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs).
“A lot of these traditional assets are coming onchain and we want to be ready to provide that technology to bring a lot of that finance into a more efficient and transparent infrastructure.”
Chainlink and Aave, which has been secured by Chainlink Price Feeds since its inception, provide foundational infrastructure for top new DeFi projects such as World Liberty Financial (WLFI) – a protocol promoting stablecoin and DeFi adoption that is backed by the 45th President and current President-elect, Donald Trump.
“It’s a big statement of how important open source technology can be as the preferred option to build a financial product,” said Kulechov. “There’s a moment happening where we built this financial infrastructure on the blockchain and now the traditional financial institutions are interested in adopting the technology.”
“It’s very impressive that the existing stack for how DeFi works, which is basically Aave and Chainlink, is what’s getting adopted by a new entrant,” Nazarov agreed. “They’re not choosing to build their own stack; they are choosing to adopt an existing way of building a decentralized financial product – in this case, Aave and Chainlink, which work so well together and have the longest historical track record of being secure for these types of DeFi operations.”
In 2025, Kulechov expects more institutions will use the technology to build increasingly tailored use cases for their clients. “This all leads to the road of getting all finance to work onchain and building better efficiency and transparency,” he said.
Nazarov predicts real-world asset tokenization will continue to be a driving force in blockchain adoption. Following the launch of BlackRock’s BUIDL last March, Chainlink has been at the forefront of growing interest in fund tokenization, which Nazarov expects will have the biggest impact on capital markets in 2025.
“Chainlink’s goal is to accelerate this RWA trend, to accelerate this fund tokenization trend, to create this highly interconnected world of blockchains where value can flow very easily from the TradFi world into the public blockchain world,” he said.
“The type of capital we’re talking about is on the more conservative side and it will want to be in the most reliable protocols, which in this case will be Aave and a small collection of others – and all of those protocols operate using the Chainlink standard.”
Watch the full interview.