During SmartCon 2025, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with Thinking Crypto podcast host Tony Edward to discuss Chainlink’s evolving role in the tokenization market and its ongoing work to provide clarity around digital assets in Washington, D.C.
Over the past few months, a growing number of global financial institutions have collaborated with Chainlink to bring data onchain via Chainlink’s institutional-grade data publishing service, DataLink.
These include leading credit rating agency S&P Global, which is using DataLink to deliver S&P Global Ratings’ Stablecoin Stability Assessments (SSAs) onchain; global index provider FTSE Russell, which is using DataLink to bring its world-leading index data onchain; and international exchange organization Deutsche Börse Group, which is using DataLink to deliver its multi-asset class market data onchain.
“Chainlink is even more critical to institutional success than it was to DeFi success because there are multiple problems that need to be solved by Chainlink for a transaction to work at all,” Nazarov explained.
“The fact that the providers have assessed the market and they see it as big enough to put their data onchain is an interesting signal that the market is there.”
Chainlink’s highly resilient oracle infrastructure, which secures nearly $100 billion throughout DeFi and has facilitated over $26 trillion in transaction value, has a unique ability to withstand unpredictabilities like last month’s AWS outage.
“The challenge is to find ways for your system to resist those black swan events and to work properly in the face of them, which is really why Chainlink powers approximately 70% of all of DeFi globally and over 80% on Ethereum,” said Nazarov.
“It’s why top institutions are now going into production with Chainlink.”
Chainlink also introduced a new milestone in private smart contracts during this year’s SmartCon. The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts, officially went live with plans for a built-in breakthrough confidential compute service.
Chainlink Confidential Compute, slated for a 2026 release, will connect real-world financial data and web2 systems across chains while keeping proprietary data, business logic, external connectivity, and computation completely confidential.
“Private smart contracts are the last big missing piece of what our industry is supposed to provide to the financial system,” Nazarov explained.
“CRE is built to be a flexible place where you can get all the different oracles that you need, whether it’s for data, bridging, identity – really any of your key building blocks you can manage contracts across all the different chains. And now hopefully you can do all that in a way that preserves the privacy of those contracts and of the workflow.”
SmartCon 2025’s theme, “From Crypto to Capitol Hill,” featured transformative web3 use cases across capital markets and governments around the world. Nazarov has spent much of the past year speaking with U.S. legislators about the advantages of smart contracts, oracles, and digital assets. Most recently, he met with Senate Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill to advocate for a landmark crypto market structure bill.
“We’re trying to convey the idea that cryptographically guaranteed markets and smart contracts are actually the best thing for the financial system and it can actually help the U.S. and the U.S. financial markets in massive ways,” he said.
“That is starting to be understood and you can see that in the market structure bill. They finally have this clear realization that it’s not about crypto coins – this is the next iteration of the financial system.”
Watch the full conversation.