Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov recently sat down with Scott Melker on The Wolf Of All Streets podcast to reflect on the first White House Crypto Summit and how the U.S. is pivoting toward global leadership in blockchain and digital asset adoption.
“It was pretty amazing; I think ‘surreal’ might, in some ways, be an accurate term, if you think about where everything was even three to four months ago,” Nazarov said of his opportunity to address the President, cabinet officials, and lawmakers in Washington, D.C. last week.
“I think it’s a massive, massive shift. It’s a very good example of how quickly the United States can adapt when it wants to adapt.”
He described the new administration’s initiative to move at tech speed, beginning with an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and the subsequent push for stablecoin and market structure legislation.
During his time at the White House and in previous meetings with government representatives including Counselor to the Secretary of Treasury for Digital Assets, Tyler Williams, Nazarov asserted his belief that the path toward American blockchain leadership is through tokenizing assets onchain.
Having enabled over $19 trillion in transaction value as the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink supports three essential properties of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs): real-time reserve verification through Proof of Reserve, secure and reliable interoperability through Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), and automated compliance through Automation.
Nazarov told Melker he envisions Chainlink-powered RWAs would function as unified golden records that transparently collect and dynamically update critical information about the status and ownership of an asset throughout the multi-chain ecosystem.
For example, tokenized gold would prove it is fully backed by gold secured in a vault, while tokenized real estate would be packaged with vital information such as whether or not the property has a lien.
To position itself at the forefront of the new onchain global economy, Nazarov said the U.S. must first create superior digital assets and then automate compliance so the rest of the world can access them.
“You basically want everyone to wrap and rewrap the asset that comes out of your financial system,” he explained.
In his view, the role of governments is to create the regulatory and legal clarity that banks, fintechs, and DeFi protocols need to tokenize virtually everything that can be represented onchain.
“The governments that do the best job at that will accelerate their digital asset economy,” he said.
“Once you open these floodgates of legal clarity and regulatory clarity, our industry actually goes from being about cryptocurrencies to being about digital assets and real-world assets, because that’s the thing that money flows into in a very large proportion.”
Because he believes tokenized assets will significantly eclipse the value of cryptocurrency, Nazarov said the U.S. needs to focus on generating the overwhelming majority of RWAs as quickly and efficiently as possible.
“How does the U.S. get to the same percentage of tokenized real-world assets coming out of the U.S. that it has for stablecoins that are 90%+ U.S. dollar-based? That’s what success looks like.”
Watch the full interview.