Soon after Swift’s announcement that it will collaborate with more than a dozen top banks and infrastructure providers to transact with a variety of blockchains via Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Real Vision host Ash Bennington to distill what this integration could mean for the future of global finance.
“The problem that banks face is that they have hundreds of chains that they’ll need to integrate with and Chainlink will connect them to those hundreds of chains through one integration,” Nazarov explained. “It’s not called Chainlink by accident.”
He emphasized the essential role of Swift’s financial messaging standard, which is utilized by 11,000 banks around the world. Pointing to a “huge army of people” in the financial industry who use Swift’s standard, he said, “Those people aren’t going to get retrained on something else.”
CCIP would allow banks to seamlessly connect to a range of private and public blockchains using their existing infrastructure including Swift’s messaging standard.
“You’re taking the infrastructure that already exists, that already is secure, that already transacts quadrillions of dollars in value, and then you’re connecting it to CCIP and the Chainlink Network security model, which has itself processed over 7.7 trillion dollars in transaction value,” Nazarov explained.
CCIP would essentially act as an intermediary that receives commands from banks in Swift’s messaging format, translates them into CCIP’s cross-chain messaging standard, and securely delivers them on-chain. The goal is to enable an ecosystem where banks can exchange digital assets with each other as well as the public blockchain sphere.
“The benefit of this is that everybody can adopt hundreds of blockchains much faster, both private and public chains, and the reason that I think [banks] are going with CCIP is because of the proven security model that we have around Chainlink oracle networks,” Nazarov said. “Basically CCIP and Swift messages go together very well.”
“Potentially, this is a very big deal,” Bennington said.
“I think it’s a very big deal,” Nazarov agreed. “It’s been taking an immense amount of effort and collaboration with some of the smartest people in these organizations.”
He described the method by which CCIP would allow the existing financial system to operate on-chain. “What this is basically doing is, instead of just having one part of the global financial system adopt CCIP, this is looking to prove that the whole global financial system can adopt CCIP across the messaging standard, the market infrastructure, and the bank participants.”
In his view, this capability marks a turning point in traditional finance’s move on-chain.
“This is the first time that I’m actually seeing banks disconnect their adoption of blockchain technology from whatever is going on in the crypto markets,” he said. “Now, even if the crypto markets are going through a rough patch, [banks] are still very actively adopting blockchain technology and that’s only accelerating.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full conversation with Ash Bennington on Real Vision Crypto.