The eleventh episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” spotlight series features Nadine Chakar and Dan Doney from the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), who examine the most promising use cases for tokenization and how DTCC’s work with Chainlink is increasing efficiency and interoperability throughout the onchain economy.
DTCC is a leading financial market infrastructure whose recent Smart NAV industry pilot leveraged its digital asset capabilities and Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to demonstrate how traditional financial institutions can deliver key mutual fund data onchain. The collaboration marked a significant advancement in fund tokenization, which introduces lower costs and greater efficiencies.
“The whole idea is to really do for digital assets what we do for traditional assets and have a resilient, scalable, and interoperable environment,” Chakar explained. “We want to be the digital financial markets of the future.”
Chainlink has already enabled over $15 trillion in onchain transaction value. Its full stack of tokenization infrastructure provides the foundational data and cross-chain connectivity needed to create, secure, and update data-driven tokenized real-world assets throughout their entire life cycle on any chain.
Doney listed atomic settlement among blockchain technology’s most attractive features.
“That can have a major impact on the bank’s efficiency and performance on the order of millions of dollars a day,” he said. “There’s a substantial driver there, and once you open those markets to tokenization and automation, everything else follows.”
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink aims to unite decentralized finance and capital markets into a global internet of contracts. Chakar emphasized interoperability’s role in achieving this goal.
“You have a lot of financial institutions that have sunk billions in their technology, so telling them to throw it all away for new digital rails – that’s a hard pill to swallow,” she explained.
“This ability to bridge between legacy systems and the new blockchain rails is a critical enabler,” Doney agreed. “You shouldn’t have to make a choice to go to the digital world and then never come back or to stay where you are.”
As illustrated by Swift’s proof of concept, CCIP allows banks such as ANZ to transfer tokenized assets between public blockchains and private bank chains using their existing infrastructure, unlocking new markets and utility.
“What you see in terms of interoperability is there’s a proliferation of ledgers,” Doney said. “This is why Chainlink’s role is so very important – we expect that there’ll be many ledgers, and there’s a need to move the value between the ledgers and especially the need to move data between ledgers.”
He explained how Chainlink’s highly reliable decentralized data establishes cross-chain consensus that makes atomic settlement possible.
“If our target is near instantaneous settlement, then data has to agree across all of these ledgers,” he said. “This is why our partnership with Chainlink is so very important, because this allows us to write data once and have it proliferate across all the networks, to move value freely between whatever the best ledger technology is of the day, so that we can meet the high-volume requirements that are coming.”
Ultimately, cross-chain connectivity enables unified global markets that democratize access to financial opportunity. “By bringing all of these marketplaces together, making transactions extremely efficient, we’re able to get to markets that are more fair and more open in the future,” Doney said.
“I dream of a world that is totally open, efficient, accessible, democratized – and that’s what I love about this technology,” Chakar agreed. “It makes a lot of these sophisticated, high-value investments accessible to a lot of people. At the end of the day, I think the end consumer is the winner here.”
Watch the eleventh episode of “The Future Is On” featuring DTCC’s Nadine Chakar and Dan Doney.