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.
Sandra Ro is CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC), the largest industry association for the blockchain technology and digital assets community. She sat down with Malandrino to discuss some of the primary innovations, such as tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), accelerating web3 adoption throughout traditional industries.
“Tokenization is a big one and also digital money, but I think the world has evolved beyond that,” Ro said. “Now we’re looking at digital identity; we’re looking at supply chain; we’re looking at global commerce.”
She anticipates digital identities and digital wallets will eventually be “ubiquitous across multiple industries,” such as healthcare, agriculture, energy, and commodities.
“We’re going to start seeing some really interesting conversations on that front,” she said.
While web3 is still in its early “awkward” teenage phase, Ro believes its benefits are already so impactful that it’s only a matter of time before the technology is firmly embedded in most aspects of our world.
“Some people would argue that the hard pill has been swallowed by web2, TradFi and that frankly most are coming along the development curve,” she said. “Some are obviously more innovative than others, but ultimately there is a web2/web3 crossover and that is where groups like Chainlink are playing a critical role.”
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has enabled over $17 trillion in transaction value and provides a comprehensive set of oracle services that empower traditional financial institutions to tokenize RWAs onchain, among numerous other use cases.
Moving forward, Ro said the focus is on continuing to establish shared infrastructure standards and regulatory clarity throughout the world.
“At a global level, the complexity is real. But more and more people, including regulators, are having this dialogue, and I think that’s very heartening to see.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Sandra Ro.