Yesterday CoinDesk rolled out its annual Most Influential list featuring Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, “The Crypto Oracle,” for leading the effort to join TradFi and DeFi into a better global financial system.
The profile highlighted Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and Swift’s proof of concept demonstrating how more than 11,000 financial institutions can use Swift’s PKI and CCIP to transact with a variety of public and private blockchains, creating what Nazarov envisions will be a global internet of contracts fueled by the world’s largest liquidity layer.
The goal of CCIP is enabling tokenized real-world assets to flow freely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications, unlocking exciting new use cases like ANZ’s CCIP-powered reef credits.
“By enabling over $9 trillion in transaction value since 2022 across a wide range of verticals, including banking, DeFi, global trade, gaming, insurance and other major sectors, the Chainlink platform is integral to realizing the verifiable web and helping to bring the largest financial institutions in the world on-chain,” Nazarov told CoinDesk.
As more big banks launch various blockchain initiatives, Nazarov anticipates traditional financial institutions will race to create their own chains and digital assets “which will eventually be connected back to public chains, growing the crypto industry.”
Looking ahead to 2024, Nazarov said his top priority is ensuring CCIP becomes the global standard connecting capital markets to web3. CoinDesk highlighted how well-suited he is for this task: “It’s fitting that he can rock both a plaid shirt and a three-piece suit, a symbol of the two worlds coming together.”