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.
Alexandre Kech is the CEO of Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), a supranational organization which supports the implementation and use of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) to increase transparency and prevent corporate fraud in global markets. Kech sat down with Malandrino to discuss GLEIF’s plans to bring the LEI onchain.
GLEIF was established by the Financial Stability Board in 2014 and is backed by the Regulatory Oversight Committee (ROC). The Global LEI Index is the only online source of global open, standardized, high-quality legal entity reference data.
Kech described the Lehman Brothers collapse and 2008 financial crisis as the impetus behind GLEIF.
“Banks struggled to have a clear view on the exposure they had to the various legal entities because there was no global standard for identifying those entities. GLEIF was created for that purpose initially – identification of legal entities to ensure transparency, better risk management – and now it’s evolving into the payment space, supply chain management, and blockchain as potentially an identifier that can be used across chains for any needs of KYB.”
At this year’s Sibos, Kesh sat down with Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov to talk about bringing GLEIF’s verifiable credential system into the blockchain world via Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
“Chainlink is collaborating with now traditional players like Euroclear, UBS and other banks to enable traditional finance to move onto web3, so that’s definitely a trend that is not going to be stopped,” Kesh told Malandrino.
“We need to have an integration layer across chains, because we can’t live in sets of tokenization islands – that’s why it’s quite important to have players like Chainlink that enable that interoperability,” he said. “You also need an identity system that works cross-chain and is not locked into a specific blockchain.”
Kesh compared the web3 concept of verifiable cross-chain identity to the web2 world.
“With my Apple ID, I can connect to multiple applications; it’s the same principle for the LEI with a legal entity identifier – I can connect and identify myself across different platforms,” he said.
“What’s next for GLEIF is working with Chainlink and others in integrating the LEI system and the verifiable credential system that we’ve built on the various blockchains that they support, but also to connect traditional and blockchain and web3 through that system.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Alexandre Kech.