SmartCon 2025 featured presentations from more than 100 web3 pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the theme,“From Crypto to Capitol Hill.” To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion.
Omar Azhar is VP of Business Development at Matter Labs, the engineering team behind ZKsync – an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that uses zero-knowledge (ZK) infrastructure. Azhar sat down with Malandrino to discuss bringing traditional finance (TradFi) onchain with Chainlink and how tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) will evolve over the coming years.
“Blockchain technology and Ethereum is a step function up in terms of how we think about building financial products and how we think about information flows in the banking world or the capital markets world,” said Azhar, who was previously a leader in EY’s technology consulting practice.
“This is definitely the future.”
RWAs such as tokenized funds offer two key benefits: better efficiency and composability.
While efficiency gains from onchain settlement versus T+2 or even T+30 in traditional finance could save up to 40% in back office costs, added utility enhances liquidity and drives innovation.
“If you have banks tokenize their deposit, all of a sudden you can start moving things 24/7,” he explained.
“On top of that, you can also have a money market fund and all of a sudden you’re doing cash sweeps instantaneously. So any time your cash is sitting there, it’s earning yield by being in a money market fund. And any time it needs to move around, you immediately swap it to a tokenized deposit or a stablecoin and you can make payments.”
ZKsync’s cutting-edge ZK innovation is designed to help businesses thrive in the digital assets economy by enhancing performance and connectivity while preserving privacy.
“We like to say we’re building incorruptible financial infrastructure,” Azhar explained.
“Essentially, it’s being able to verify to anyone that what I am doing is correct and these are the assets I actually have but I don’t need to show you any data.”
In 2023, ZKsync integrated Chainlink Price Feeds and joined Chainlink Scale to support the creation of secure, scalable, feature-rich decentralized applications. Last year, ZKsync integrated Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to expand its Elastic Chain ecosystem and help satisfy growing institutional interest in tokenization. This year, ZKsync added Data Streams, Functions, and Automation to its Chainlink stack.
Azhar highlighted Chainlink’s infrastructure, which has enabled over $26 trillion in transaction value, as key to ensuring scalability and interoperability.
“They essentially help you get from a zero to one very quickly because everything is already there.”
Ultimately, digital asset adoption depends on integrating onchain finance with TradFi’s existing reporting infrastructure.
“That is something that people like Chainlink are going to solve. Without that, it’s very hard for most of the market to come onchain,” said Azhar.
He envisions a rapid shift toward onchain finance as tokenized assets provide more real-world value.
“I think it’s going to continue being a 10x increase each year, which is really exciting from a business value standpoint.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Omar Azhar.