At last month’s CoOperate event in Paris, Chainlink Labs Chief Product Officer Kemal El Moujahid gave a keynote speech about the possibilities Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks for web3.
With CCIP live on the Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and Avalanche blockchains as well as multiple testnets, developers can now start building critical use cases for cross-chain smart contracts. El Moujahid explained how CCIP brings web3 closer to broad adoption by recreating the composability and user experience of web2.
“Web2 developers can mix and match the best of all worlds and in web3 we can’t do that,” he explained. “I believe this problem is holding back the whole industry; it’s a plague for everyone.”
In his view, CCIP does for web3 what TCP/IP did for the internet because it creates an industry-wide standard that allows developers to optimize and combine different features from multiple blockchains.
“It’s like a language,” he said. “What we need is a common language that we all speak because once we all speak the same language, then we can fully innovate and collaborate.”
Like a language, CCIP was built with the flexibility to enable near-limitless possibilities.
“You need to be able to accommodate all the various and amazing use cases that developers are going to come up with,” he explained. “We don’t know what they’re going to do and so we needed to create something that’s as flexible as possible so that the maximum number of developers can adopt the standard.”
As a complete web3 services platform that has already enabled more than $8 trillion in transaction value and delivered over nine billion data points on-chain, Chainlink is uniquely positioned to create a global language for web3. With a vast ecosystem of nearly two thousand web3 projects integrating its services, Chainlink is also collaborating with Swift and over a dozen top financial institutions to develop how banks transact with blockchains through CCIP.
Beyond early use cases for CCIP such as Synthetix’s Synth Teleporters and Aave’s cross-chain governance mechanism, El Moujahid pointed toward a horizon full of “all the other things that we’re super excited to see developers come up with, all the other use cases, all the wonderful things – the unexpected things – that are really specific to platforms and that we’re really excited for you to build.”
Watch the full keynote speech.