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.
Building on his SmartCon keynote, which celebrated the mainnet launch of Chainlink Data Streams alongside Chainlink Automation 2.0 and Chainlink Functions (Beta), Chainlink Labs Chief Product Officer Kemal El Moujahid sat down with Malandrino to talk about how these key product updates bring web3 closer to mainstream adoption.
“Chainlink is creating a platform for connecting web2 and web3 in three pillars: data, cross-chain, and compute,” El Moujahid said.
He explained how new Chainlink products advance all three pillars: Data Streams provides low-latency data to unlock DeFi derivatives; Cross-Chain Interoperability protocol (CCIP) enables cross-chain connectivity for global banks and DeFi applications; Automation 2.0 delivers a tenfold increase in computational capacity; and Functions connects any smart contract to any API.
The combination of these services initiates what El Moujahid believes to be a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.
“What smart contracts or web3 allows you to do as a developer is build an application that’s verifiable. For consumers, what that means is that you truly own your assets or your data.”
Specifically, CCIP allows more than 11,500 global banks using Swift’s messaging standard to interact with the entire blockchain economy, where tokenized real-world assets can flow freely and securely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications.
“Tokenization is obviously a huge deal for the financial industry, because assets onchain are more valuable and they’re easier to transact,” El Moujahid explained. “The whole sector is moving towards putting assets onchain, and for that they need to be able to connect their legacy systems with onchain systems.”
CCIP allows traditional financial institutions to interact with a growing number of blockchains through a single integration.
“The number of chains just keeps increasing,” said El Moujahid. “What you need is a single abstraction layer.”
He underscored Chainlink’s goal of creating web3 services that work with, not against, existing financial infrastructure in order to accelerate adoption.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to start from scratch and actually with Chainlink you don’t,” he said. “You can use your legacy system and then use Chainlink to connect the most important parts onchain. This is how mobile, and the cloud, and now AI have become mass market and how we believe web3 is going to become mass market.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Kemal El Moujahid.