On a recent episode of the New Era Finance podcast hosted by Michaël van de Poppe, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov covered numerous topics from the evolution of web3 and DeFi to how Chainlink powers a spectrum of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) poised to unlock crypto’s next multi-trillion-dollar phase of adoption.
As the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink has enabled over $19 trillion in transaction value and provides essential infrastructure for tokenizing RWAs and building cutting-edge cross-chain applications. Nazarov explained how the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) accelerates the creation of critical new applications by streamlining access to Chainlink’s services in one place.
Chainlink unveiled CRE during last year’s SmartCon, where Nazarov outlined how CRE’s unified computing environment could accelerate TradFi’s web3 adoption the way Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) automated finance in the 1950s and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) brought finance online in the 1990s.
Nazarov told van de Poppe that CRE plays a fundamental role in Chainlink’s vision of the future.
“You basically need a new environment to compose all of the different things that are needed to make an advanced smart contract or an advanced blockchain transaction,” he said. “This is the CRE.”
With a five-year track record of security and reliability, Chainlink boasts a growing collection of over a thousand bespoke oracle networks, which Nazarov envisions as “libraries” that deliver various pieces of data, connectivity, and computation onchain.
“Now you need to take those individual libraries and pieces of code and you need to compose them easily,” he explained.
As an example, he illustrated how a financial entity could use CRE to issue an RWA on one blockchain, then set specifications for how that asset could be purchased on 50 other blockchains, all of which have different international identity and legal requirements alongside various needs for price data and proof of reserves.
“Here’s a single piece of code that defines all of that complexity. It pulls on all the libraries that manage all that complexity for identity, for cross-chain connectivity, for price data, for proof of reserves, for whatever else you need.”
Nazarov believes developers will ultimately leverage CRE to build incredibly complex applications, such as an AI model that can balance a token cross-chain, in a much smaller fraction of time.
“In the DeFi world, it would take months. In the banking world, it might take a year plus, if you’re lucky. With CRE, what we want to do is take it down to days and eventually down to hours.”
Watch the full interview.