During the RWA Cannes Summit, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with Alexandre Kech, CEO of GLEIF (the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation), to discuss how Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) and Cross-Chain Identity (CCID) framework make it possible for hundreds of trillions of dollars in institutional capital to enter the onchain economy.
Kech summed up his view on tokenization by quoting BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2025 Annual Chairman’s Letter to Investors, in which he wrote, “If we’re serious about building an efficient and accessible financial system, championing tokenization alone won’t suffice. We must solve digital verification, too.”
“You need to be able to, when you trade a token, know that it’s a J.P. Morgan token and not someone pretending to be a J.P. Morgan token,” Kech elaborated.
“And you need to be able to know that the wallet you’re sending a token to, as an institution, is a wallet belonging to someone who is an accredited investor, or is an institution, or is allowed to hold that asset that you want to tokenize on the blockchain.”
GLEIF oversees use of the globally recognized LEI (Legal Entity Identifier) which enables clear and unique identification of legal entities in the traditional financial system. The vLEI (verifiable Legal Entity Identifier), an advanced version of LEI designed for the digital world, integrates with Chainlink’s ACE and CCID to enhance compliance across blockchain ecosystems.
Just as Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) allows digital assets and data to be exchanged between different networks, CCID facilitates portable, verifiable identity that can be used across different chains.
“If you KYC with one institution on one specific chain, you have credentials allocated to you as an individual or as an institution, and you can reuse them,” Kech explained. “They become portable.”
Done correctly, Nazarov believes compliance and identity can become a feature, not a bug, of onchain finance.
“Our industry can facilitate compliance and identity verification, and the efficiencies around compliance and identity, much better and in much more cryptographically guaranteed ways than the traditional finance system,” he said.
The goal, he explained, is for tokenized assets to become “cheaper and easier for institutions to use, because the cost of compliance, the cost of identity verification, the cost of maintaining your compliance is so much lower in our industry versus the traditional world.”
Watch the full conversation.