President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, a landmark bill establishing the first federal guardrails for US dollar-pegged stablecoins, into law last week. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov was at the White House with blockchain and cryptocurrency pioneers including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss to witness the historic event.
Nazarov recently sat down with Austin Arnold, the founder and host of Altcoin Daily, to discuss how the GENIUS Act can accelerate the adoption of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), for which Chainlink provides the most comprehensive and widely used oracle infrastructure.
“What has happened now is that the largest economy has made it legal to tokenize their cash,” Nazarov said. He believes the $250 billion stablecoin market could reach $2 trillion “relatively quickly” as a result.
With legislation expressly clarifying how different entities can compliantly tokenize the US dollar, he anticipates “a massive increase” in the number of firms competing to generate stablecoins. As stablecoin adoption yields greater onchain purchasing power, he expects a proliferation of tokenized RWAs such as real estate, equities, funds, and commodities will follow.
“It’s very significant, because my view is that our industry will go from being about cryptocurrencies to being about real-world assets.”
This is a boon, not a bust, for cryptocurrency.
“The more stablecoins there are, and the more that other assets can be converted to buy cryptocurrency, the better it is for cryptocurrency adoption.”
Stablecoins can also unlock decentralized finance (DeFi) at scale.
“It’s very natural for onchain collateral – whether that’s cash collateral, whether that’s tokenized asset collateral – to find its way into DeFi, because DeFi can generate attractive yields and it can do it in a more transparent and more de-risked way than central financial institutions.”
Having enabled over $22 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink’s essential tokenization infrastructure supplies stablecoins and RWAs with verifiable onchain data, proof of reserves, and cross-chain interoperability. The Chainlink Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) is a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services, which integrates existing identity systems with onchain infrastructure to support policy enforcement.
“Chainlink is very purposefully built to accelerate and enable high-quality, secure, reliable, and compliant tokenization,” Nazarov said. “And compliant tokenization is going to be particularly important because of institutional adoption of tokenization.”
The stablecoin bill is just the beginning. Last week, the House also passed the CLARITY Act, a market structure bill aimed at establishing a clear regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and defining the roles of the SEC and CFTC in overseeing digital assets.
“The market structure bill, in terms of the scope of what it covers, could fundamentally be more impactful,” Nazarov explained, because “the amount of tokens that can be generated beyond tokenized cash and stablecoins is fundamentally larger.”
With much to look forward to, he called the GENIUS Act a definitive victory.
“People are celebrating,” he said. “There’s never been a time that I’ve been more hopeful about our industry changing the global financial system. This is the clearest signal our industry has ever had that it’s going to be the way that the financial system and the world works.”
Watch the full conversation.