During Sibos 2026, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Parallax Ventures’ Azor Barros, Microsoft’s Martin Moeller, and FF News’ Lea Salamon on the Innotribe Stage for a panel discussion about the future of value in the age of AI.
Having enabled over $34 trillion in onchain transaction value, Chainlink is the only oracle platform to meet ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 institutional security standards required for tokenizing real-world assets onchain.
Nazarov expects a future where AI inevitably makes “a lot of purchasing decisions” regarding tokenized assets.
“I don’t think humans are going to be clicking buttons anymore,” he said.
Chainlink’s infrastructure, which establishes security by default, plays a critical role at the intersection of traditional industries and AI, from enhancing global telecommunications to standardizing corporate actions processing and powering the emerging agentic economy.
“The more AI agents are directed to do things, the more they’re going to need infrastructure through which they can do those operations for the tokenized digital asset side.”
In a world where agents become their own user group, Nazarov said the goal is to make digital assets as appealing as possible.
“You need to make stablecoins and tokenized deposit payments attractive compared to traditional payments and you need to provide infrastructure and access points for them to use that set of digital assets.”
The integration of GLEIF’s verifiable Legal Entity Identifier (vLEI) with Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) and AI systems creates a tamper-proof framework for automated, onchain corporate compliance and verifiable agentic workflows.
When it comes to keeping AI agents in check, Nazarov advocated for a global registry and public key system to manage predetermined rulesets for each specific agent.
He believes the role of humans will depend entirely on the reliability of the AI.
“If it does a good job 100% of the time, it will be just like your best employee. It will be like your best person. What do you do with the best person you have? You give them a ton of stuff to do.”
Because the nature of AI is to pursue the quickest, most efficient solution, he said agents will necessarily prioritize tokenized assets over traditional assets.
“We’re working on that. It’s a distinct and committed goal.”
The key is architecting a system where different forms of tokenized cash, including tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and CBDCs, are appropriately risk scored and exchangeable.
“That’s actually the problem we’re working through right now is how to make this all interoperable.”