SmartCon 2025 featured presentations from more than 100 web3 pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the theme,“From Crypto to Capitol Hill.” To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion.
Corey Caplan is the co-founder of Dolomite, a margin protocol and DEX that can support over 1,000 unique assets. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss why Chainlink’s infrastructure is critical for DeFi protocols, especially as they integrate with traditional finance (TradFi).
Dolomite, which uses Chainlink Price Feeds, Automation, and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) was one of the first ten projects to be accepted into the Chainlink Build program back in 2022. Caplan has since attributed DeFi’s successful evolution to Chainlink’s essential oracle services.
“We see them as very key infrastructure for building a money market protocol and it was really important for us to establish a long-term relationship with Chainlink, so that they can continue to evolve with us and continue to meet our needs,” Caplan told Malandrino.
Chainlink’s hyper-reliable oracle infrastructure has facilitated over $27 trillion in transaction value and secures nearly $100 billion throughout DeFi. Caplan considers the Chainlink data and interoperability standard indispensable to onchain finance.
“You need to be really careful about how you value collateral and what changes with liquidity as the market shifts over time,” he explained.
“If any of those things are wrong, catastrophic failures can occur that lead to users taking on bad positions, protocols taking on bad debt. With Chainlink being a cornerstone technology, there’s no room for error. There’s only one oracle provider that’s able to have that track record and that’s Chainlink.”
Recently, Stewards, a diversified financial company operating across private credit, real assets, and digital finance, announced a $10 million strategic partnership with Dolomite to support Stewards’ new Digital Asset Treasury initiative using Dolomite’s blockchain infrastructure.The collaboration achieves a new milestone in connecting TradFi to DeFi by allowing Stewards to use onchain assets for its treasury in a compliant and transparent way.
“Stewards is looking to expand their footprint by moving into crypto and that’s where they believe the future is going,” Caplan said. “They see Dolomite as a key infrastructure partner to help facilitate these financial services over time.”
He emphasized Dolomite’s focus on building bespoke white glove use cases that are able to service the specific needs of companies like Stewards.
“If we can crack the code with Stewards and replicate that with other companies, we can pave the way and unlock a lot of capital flowing into DeFi, all powered by Chainlink.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Corey Caplan.