During the 2022 Chainlink SmartCon, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino hosted a two-day interview lineup at the MarketSite Studio in Times Square with some of the event’s 100+ expert speakers from the Chainlink ecosystem.
After talking to Digital Asset Research CEO Doug Schwenk about how clean data is foundational to the evolving DeFi industry, Malandrino sat down with Microsoft’s Director of Digital Transformation, Blockchain, and Cloud Supply Chain, Yorke Rhodes III, to discuss Microsoft’s web3 strategy and Ethereum’s growing ecosystem.
Having co-founded Microsoft’s blockchain work back in 2015, Rhodes has since played an important role in shaping the company’s long ecosystem approach to web3.
“We’ve always looked at innovative technologies throughout our career as a company,” he told Malandrino. He highlighted Microsoft’s recent web3 investments including decentralized analytics platform Space and Time, whose team presented at SmartCon.
When asked about the recent Ethereum merge, Rhodes said the “massive upgrade” exceeded his expectations, telling Malandrino, “It’s a moment in history, not just a moment in crypto and blockchain.”
In his view, Ethereum’s new sustainable footprint opens a realm of opportunities in web3 as well as web2. He pointed to the decentralized gaming industry as a particularly strong link between web2 and web3 “because of the number of web2 users who are gamers.”
Having attended SmartCon annually since its inception, Rhodes said the event holds significance, not only because of “the intellectual capacity of the whole group,” but also because of the fundamental role Chainlink’s decentralized oracle infrastructure plays in widening web3’s reach.
“The connection through a Chainlink-style oracle between web2 and web3 is a very significant connection, and it opens up a different conversation with web2 companies like SWIFT and others that is harder to have when you’re in a specifically web3 developer ecosystem conversation.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Yorke Rhodes III on Nasdaq TradeTalks.