In a new video clip, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov distilled the complexities of cryptographic truth into one fundamental question, inspired by the advent of Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin is a piece of cryptographic truth about the transactions about one token,” he said. “And the thing that fascinated me was that it wasn’t something that could be manipulated.”
Over time, Nazarov began thinking about how the concept of cryptographic truth could be applied to other synthetic assets as well as transactional relationships and even pillars of society.
“I realized that you could apply this guarantee to other things, whether that was transactions about ownership, whether that was about insurance, whether that was about ad networks, or concert tickets, or real estate,” he explained.
“And so the real question is: How far does that idea go and what degree of control over your own life and what degree of freedom does this new relationship with the digital world create?”
Nazarov sees “shared truth” as the fabric that holds society together. Without the ability to generate consensus about facts and events, he explained, society begins to unravel.
“I think we’re now starting to see what happens when there is no shared truth and society can’t agree on what’s going on.”
As web3’s leading decentralized oracle network, Chainlink connects deterministic blockchains to real-world data and computation that facilitate new use cases for cryptographic truth. Nazarov views Chainlink’s evolution as an ongoing quest to find “where technology fixes problems that institutions have been trying to fix for centuries.”
As Chainlink’s infrastructure expands to enable more complex, sophisticated, and now cross-chain smart contract applications, Nazarov is optimistic that “a very significant percentage” of human interactions can ultimately be made more efficient and predictable with infrastructure that provides cryptographic guarantees.
“I think it could extend to almost every aspect of society being made reliable through technology in the form of cryptographic truth,” he said.
Watch the full video.