Last month, the Aave DAO launched its U.S. dollar-pegged GHO stablecoin on Arbitrum in the first phase of its cross-chain expansion strategy powered by Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). Aave Labs founder Stani Kulechov said expanding GHO’s reach with CCIP increases its appeal with lower fees, faster transactions, and better liquidity.
This week, Kulechov and Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino to explore how blockchain interoperability standards like CCIP and stablecoins like GHO facilitate the convergence of DeFi and TradFi into a more transparent and efficient global financial system.
Nazarov, who previously highlighted the launch of BlackRock’s first tokenized fund as a watershed moment for digital assets, believes the intersection of traditional markets and DeFi is inevitable.
“It’s both ecosystems benefiting from each other’s unique capabilities and unique value,” he said.
“We’ll see more and more institutions becoming interested in the technology because of the benefits that it provides,” Kulechov agreed.
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has enabled over $12.5 trillion in transaction value and provides a comprehensive set of services, including CCIP, that are critical for creating and securing tokenized real-world assets and stablecoins throughout the growing multi-chain economy.
“You have to have some sort of communication standard that is secure and reliable that you can actually use to communicate between different networks and move these digital assets that are on the blockchain across networks,” Kulechov explained. “Chainlink’s CCIP implementation actually provides that kind of tooling.”
“It’s really the ability to gain access to liquidity and to reuse that liquidity across many different chains in an efficient way, so that you can access all the assets and the assets can have access to all the purchasing power,” Nazarov added.
Reiterating his belief that “TradFi will become the biggest customer of DeFi,” Nazarov said stablecoins like GHO offer a payment method that makes it easier for traditional financial institutions to interact with DeFi. In his long-term outlook, Chainlink’s infrastructure would allow all of the world’s value to be reformatted into a superior state onchain.
“I think it’s a trillion-dollar and beyond opportunity,” Kulechov said of real-world asset tokenization. He described blockchain technology as a means for creating a “better, faster, stronger, more reliable” financial system that enhances real-world assets with transparency, programmability, and fractionalization onchain.
“If we have all the significant assets and transactions on a public ledger like the blockchain, what actually happens is that we can quantify much better the risk and rewards of these different types of financial opportunities,” he said.
“Essentially, I think every single asset that is existing in traditional finance, whether it’s a paper-based agreement or in some sort of a database, could actually exist as a real-world asset onchain.”
Watch the full conversation.