SmartCon 2025 featured presentations from more than 100 web3 pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the theme,“From Crypto to Capitol Hill.” To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion.
David Palmer is Chief Product Officer at Pairpoint, a global technology company building the world’s largest economy of things (EoT) ecosystem by allowing machines, vehicles, and devices to identify, connect, and transact in real time. He sat down with Malandrino to discuss how integrating internet of things (IoT), blockchain, and AI technology unlocks usage-based finance models across the automotive, supply chain, and healthcare industries.
A joint venture of Vodafone, a telecommunications company serving over 275 million customers across 15 countries, and Sumitomo Corporation, one of Japan’s leading integrated trading and investment companies with ¥11 trillion in total assets, Pairpoint recently collaborated with Chainlink to unlock new usage-based, asset-as-a-service financing for telecom infrastructure with AI capabilities.
“The biggest thing at the moment is obviously AI,” Palmer told Malandrino. “IoT can bring business data to AI. But that data needs to be trustable and secure. And that’s where the link between IoT and blockchain comes in.”
Leveraging SecurePoint technologies, Nillion, and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), Pairpoint is bringing asset usage and pricing data onchain to calculate repayments and investor rewards for input to new asset-as-a-service financial products.
Investors purchase tokenized assets that support infrastructure investments which enable AI capabilities in existing telecom towers. Then CRE sources and relays asset usage and pricing data onchain, where it is used to calculate investor rewards based on real-world AI computing activity.
“Essentially with us providing the connectivity and the usage, Chainlink getting that onchain and providing an API for finance companies, you have new usage-based finance,” Palmer explained.
He said Chainlink’s role is critical to bridge connected assets with blockchains while ensuring data integrity at scale.
“It’s about convergence. Blockchain will become a critical part of the telco infrastructure and the IoT infrastructure moving forward. Because we need distribution – we need the resilience it brings, and we need trust in the data that’s associated with it that blockchain can bring.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with David Palmer.