SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Stephanie Lheureux is Head of Digital Assets Competence Center at Euroclear, a major financial market infrastructure custodying around €40 trillion of assets. She sat down with Malandrino to discuss how using blockchain technology to tokenize real-world assets and create unified golden records onchain can eliminate costly inefficiencies throughout global industries.
“I believe that tokenization is a concept which is transformative,” said Lheureux. “Having a kind of golden source of truth for the market is a really big change.”
As the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink has enabled over $17 trillion in transaction value and offers a full stack of oracle services for tokenizing assets. Last year, Euroclear was among a dozen major market participants in Swift’s proof of concept illustrating how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) allows traditional finance to interact with tokenized assets using existing infrastructure and messaging standards.
In October, Chainlink, Euroclear, and Swift demonstrated how LLMs and Chainlink oracles can standardize corporate actions data onchain, solving issues in corporate action processes that cost regional investor, broker, and custodian businesses up to $5 million each annually.
Lheureux elaborated on how this initiative solves inconsistencies throughout the value chain.
“The problem that they have is they are receiving this information from various data sources and it’s not always the same information,” she said. “It should be a golden source that is the same for everybody.”
Oracles and AI can be leveraged to generate a single verified source of data that can be shared in real time with all participants, reducing the need for reconciliations.
“We’re getting away from this sequential value chain into something which is more circular, where everybody in the value chain has access to the same golden source,” Lheureux explained.
She believes that while traditional finance is still in the early phases of moving onchain, the journey is inevitable.
“Digital assets and DLT and all these new technologies are here to stay, so we should all get ready. It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon, and we should continue the collaboration to unlock value and fix payments for the industry using this tech when it makes sense.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Stephanie Lheureux.