SmartCon 2023 featured more than 100 blockchain experts and financial industry leaders including founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To get a closer look at the future of web3, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with speakers at this year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.
King Leung, who is Head of Financial Services and Fintech at InvestHK, a government department supporting the establishment and expansion of overseas businesses in Hong Kong, sat down with Malandrino to discuss efforts to establish Hong Kong as a fintech and web3 hub.
“2023 is a busy year for us,” Leung said. “A number of projects have been moving into Hong Kong. And now that the projects are in Hong Kong, they also attract the funds.”
Looking toward the future of web3, Leung views the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs), along with stablecoins that enable cost-efficient cross-border payments, as the “catalyst to help uplift and elevate and transform” Hong Kong’s financial services sector.
Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks the full potential of digital assets by allowing them to flow freely throughout the multi-chain economy. During his SmartCon keynote, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said the goal of CCIP is to facilitate “the world’s largest global liquidity layer” by allowing banks to seamlessly connect legacy infrastructure with other private bank chains and public DeFi applications to create, buy, and sell RWAs.
“We have been talking to and working with Chainlink,” Leung told Malandrino. “We love the vision and more specifically CCIP. That could be the one kind of major infrastructure breakthrough – that we are able to connect the different chains. And naturally with that, the nice outcome will be high liquidity.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with King Leung.