During a Chainlink meetup at Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit in New York, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with World Liberty Financial (WLFI) co-founder Zak Folkman to discuss WLFI’s role in shaping DeFi’s future through partnerships with industry leaders such as Chainlink and Aave.
Folkman, who has anticipated DeFi’s mainstream adoption since reading the Ethereum Whitepaper in 2015, believes the moment has finally arrived.
“It’s 2025 and I think we’re really finally starting to see that monumental shift,” he said. “I think that everyone from governments to major traditional financial institutions are very much aware of this and trying to get on track before they get left behind.”
Last November, WLFI announced its DeFi protocol, which is backed by President Trump, will leverage Chainlink’s industry-standard decentralized oracle services for onchain price data and cross-chain interoperability on leading DeFi lending protocol, Aave.
“Our goal is really to merge the world of DeFi and all the best of what DeFi has to offer with a lot of the products that TradFi has to offer that are not available right now in the DeFi ecosystem,” Folkman explained.
As a U.S. corporation employing full KYC, WLFI is working directly with institutions to bring their tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) onchain and gain access to new liquidity.
“The idea here is to be able to give us, as crypto/DeFi natives, the ability to get exposure to products that are more secure, more trusted, and more time-tested that exist in a TradFi/institutional setting,” Folkman said.
Nazarov highlighted WLFI’s collaborative relationship with industry leaders in TradFi and DeFi as an accelerant to the creation of next-generation RWAs.
“We’re not going to go and rebuild Goldman Sachs; we’re going to work with Goldman Sachs,” Folkman agreed.
“Why go rebuild something that’s already done so well, like Chainlink? Our goal here is not to remake the wheel; it’s just to make sure that every driveway has two cars parked outside.”
I think World Liberty Financial is a very good example of these building blocks we’re always talking about in our industry being used now to create a world-class application,” said Nazarov.
Folkman believes that bringing DeFi’s next hundred million users and billions or trillions of dollars in liquidity onchain will ultimately hinge on creating a simple, intuitive interface that abstracts away the technical complexity while offering benefits like better yield.
“Our whole goal here is to build a very familiar style web2 application that anybody – my mom, your mom, anybody – could go on and use instantly,” he said.
“It allows them to earn, spend, and save all of their assets – whether it’s their paycheck or whether it’s their savings account or their brokerage account – in one easy-to-use place.”
Watch the full conversation.