After the SEC released 23 proposed rules that would make it easier to tokenize real-world assets in the United States, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov met with SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and key policymakers at the White House to further examine how the U.S. can become a global leader in blockchain and digital asset innovation.
Nazarov joined CNBC Crypto’s MacKenzie Sigalos to highlight the meeting’s main topics and what’s on the horizon for U.S. digital asset adoption.
He said establishing clarity around transfer agency, compliance, and cross-chain interoperability for tokenized assets are the biggest issues on the table.
“There’s a very serious effort underway by the SEC to solve many of these open questions.”
Nazarov’s focus is communicating the advantages of using smart contracts to set conditions around compliance, identity, and transferability related to digital assets.
“I want regulators to understand that they can enter a new world of automated and embedded regulation,” he said.
He distilled the benefits of establishing transaction parameters on a public blockchain.
“Instead of relying on a few select entities to run really big and costly compliance departments, you can set conditions for how transactions have to work. And those conditions have to be met in order for the transaction to continue and no person can decide to subvert them.”
Nazarov believes updating transfer agency rules to determine how digital assets exist and move onchain won’t be difficult.
“These changes are not that dramatic. I think they’re pretty straightforward technical, legal changes that, through some amount of guidance and rulemaking, can happen pretty quickly.”
Once the SEC updates these rules, he believes the U.S. will see a “tsunami” of tokenization.
“Tokenization in the U.S. markets should be an easy, smooth, and riskless process – that is something that [the SEC] has made extremely clear now,” he explained.
“We are working with them on a consistent basis to try and create clarity on what changes to transfer agency and other key rules would be the most useful for our industry. And we are receiving a lot of very real collaboration in that our goals in making the industry grow and tokenize in the U.S. financial system are shared.”