On stage at SmartCon 2025, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov delivered a keynote address highlighting the critical role of the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) in uniting traditional finance and DeFi.
“You need to bring them into the fold,” Nazarov said about connecting traditional finance to blockchain.
“That is the thing that’s going to both take our industry mainstream and enable this technology to get adopted in a way that actually powers the world, rather than just powering a subset of the world.”
He underscored smart contracts’ capacity to codify relationships.
“It’s not a guarantee of my choice or your choice or anyone else’s choice. It’s a mathematical guarantee, and that’s how it’s going to work, irrespective of anyone’s desires or choices or views, which I think is a better way for the world to work.”
Smart contracts can also be leveraged to determine a single source of truth.
“Our industry is the one that is going to achieve this by taking all the different records, and systems, and transactions, and decisions out of everyone’s hands and putting them into a smart contract,” Nazarov said.
“Smart contracts make misbehavior impossible. They make it impossible that people could do the wrong thing if they wanted to.”
As smart contracts evolve into more complex forms, they require greater synchronization across chains as well as connectivity to various forms of data. In order to scale institutional smart contract adoption with compliance and identity systems, Chainlink engineered the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts, which officially went live today.
CRE allows developers to build multi-chain, multi-oracle, multi-jurisdictional smart contracts with inherent compliance and legacy system connectivity faster than ever before.
“You can now build workflows in hours instead of weeks,” Nazarov said.
He explained how CRE introduces the capacity to manage multiple Chainlink oracle services such as Proof of Reserve, Automated Compliance Engine (ACE), and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as a single piece of code.
“There really isn’t another system like Chainlink that can give you the data, the cross-chain, the transfer agency contracts, identity and coordinate it into a single workflow.”
Chainlink also announced plans to launch a breakthrough confidential compute service on CRE that will further accelerate institutional adoption by unlocking a new class of private smart contracts.
Nazarov emphasized the goal is to bring as much capital onchain as possible.
“The more value that gets onchain from institutions in whatever form – tokenized funds, stablecoins – it just massively benefits our industry. Because the more capital, the more assets, the more cash that’s onchain, the better it is for all of us. That’s just a simple fact of life.”