During the 2022 Chainlink SmartCon event, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino hosted a two-day interview lineup at the MarketSite Studio in Times Square with some of the conference’s 100+ expert speakers from the Chainlink ecosystem.
After speaking with Chainlink Chief Product Officer Kemal El Moujahid about why every business needs a web3 strategy, Malandrino talked to Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov about how blockchain and oracle technology will empower everyday users.
“In two words, I would say that cryptographic guarantees are the foundational value our industry provides,” Nazarov said.
He explained why he believes the same consumer demand that popularized encrypted messaging services will eventually lead to the mainstream adoption of cryptographically guaranteed financial services.
“This loss of trust in messaging systems is the same thing that’s going to happen for all of the world’s value and all of the world’s digital relationships,” he said. “It’s something that’s going to come to the fore again like it did in 2008.”
The difference today, he explained, is that the trust-minimized infrastructure needed to build a cryptographically guaranteed financial system now exists.
He compared the advent of decentralized oracle networks and services like Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol to the proliferation of cloud computing services used to compose essential web2 applications like Uber.
“Web3 services such as oracle networks are really the critical final building block for the explosion of application value that’s needed for web3 to make its way into the mainstream,” he said.
When asked about the most important thing laypeople should understand about the web3 ecosystem, Nazarov said, simply, “It’s a better way for them to relate to their financial life.”
He elaborated, “I think right now the cryptocurrency ecosystem is still connected to speculation and tokens, and I think the cryptographically guaranteed portion of blockchains and web3 isn’t clear yet to many people.”
He called cryptographic guarantees “the very big fundamental difference” between relationships based on people and institutions fulfilling their promises and cryptographically guaranteed relationships where agreements are fulfilled by mathematics.
Anticipating a world “where asset ownership might not be released, where insurance companies might not fulfill their obligations due to solvency questions” with increasing frequency, Nazarov said “having a very direct, very mathematically guaranteed relationship with your financial assets, with your trading venue, with your insurance provider is something that’s going to be the difference between having that service and not having that service.”
He distilled web3’s value proposition to everyday people.
“That’s really what our industry is doing – it’s creating an alternative way to solve these problems that isn’t subject to the same failure modes as the rest of the financial system.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Sergey Nazarov on Nasdaq TradeTalks.