At last month’s FIA Boca 2024, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov spoke with Tabb Group CEO Bruce Morris about how traditional financial institutions are accelerating their digital asset strategies and how Chainlink-powered tokenized real-world assets serve as a golden record throughout the blockchain ecosystem.
Over the past couple of years, Nazarov said he’s witnessed traditional financial institutions dedicate team members to creating digital assets. At the same time, banks have come to the collective realization that the blockchain economy will be multi-chain.
“They’re all basically generating their own chains and putting those assets and various stablecoins, tokenized cash and collateral on those chains,” he said.
This creates a massive fragmentation problem that Chainlink is at the center of solving.
As the industry-leading decentralized computing platform, which has securely enabled over $10.5 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink provides a comprehensive set of services that are critical for creating and securing tokenized real-world assets such as carbon credits, private equity, and real estate on virtually any chain.
Chainlink Data Feeds continuously update tokenized assets by delivering accurate, reliable, tamper-proof market data onchain; Proof of Reserve (PoR) leverages Chainlink oracles to verify in real time that onchain assets are fully collateralized by cross-chain or offchain assets; and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks new use cases for tokenized assets, such as ANZ’s cross-chain green financial products, by allowing them to flow freely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications.
These essential oracle services combined allow tokenized assets to function as a golden record that collects and maintains critical information about an asset regardless of which chain it’s on.
“A unified golden record is basically a data container you put all kinds of data into to allow people to manage risk and know key things about the asset,” said Nazarov. Chainlink abstracts away the complexity of creating and maintaining an asset’s unified golden record as it moves between counterparties.
“This means they no longer have to contact each other; they don’t need to contact data sources; they don’t need to find out what the asset is about because every relevant piece of information and risk about the asset is continually updated to a single place that can then move across chains,” he explained.
“This ability to stay updated is also very important because you want a unified golden record to work on the chain where it was created, then you want it to be able to be moved to the chains where people purchase it, and then you want it to continue to remain updated as it moves across all these different chains. And all three of these problems we solve together.”