This week, Chainlink launched its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) on the Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, and Avalanche blockchains during the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris. Today, CCIP went live on multiple testnets where developers can start integrating the protocol to build cross-chain smart contracts.
On the final day of EthCC, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov commemorated CCIP’s general access launch by delivering a keynote speech, during which he underscored the significance of CCIP in the historical context of decentralized finance (DeFi) as well as the traditional financial system.
Highlighting failures stemming from toxic assets, market manipulation, and conflicts of interest, such as the 2008 financial crisis and last year’s FTX collapse, Nazarov said Chainlink’s objective as a web3 services platform is engineering solutions to various attack vectors in order to facilitate the creation of a more secure, reliable, and transparent alternative financial system.
“I think if we do that, we can become the financial system,” Nazarov said.
Among Chainlink’s solutions are Chainlink Data Feeds, which prevent data manipulation in DeFi. CCIP applies the same security standard that has enabled more than $8 trillion in transaction value throughout the decentralized economy to cross-chain messaging and value transfer in order to solve the blockchain industry’s interoperability problem.
“The genesis of our industry is that there is an unreliable financial system and that cryptographically guaranteed outcomes and systems can create a safe and reliable financial system,” Nazarov said.
“And now with the launch of CCIP here at EthCC, we’re able to also provide the access to value that resides on various public chains and, relatively soon, private bank chains which have even more value that can flow into these applications to make them successful and useful.”
While early adopters of CCIP include leading DeFi projects Synthetix and Aave, the world’s largest secure financial messaging services provider, Swift, is collaborating with over a dozen top financial institutions to develop how banks can transact with a variety of public and private blockchains through CCIP.
In a comprehensive blog post published earlier this week, Chainlink Labs Chief Product Officer Kemal El Moujahid detailed a series of use cases facilitated by CCIP, as well as the full spectrum of security advantages, including an Active Risk Management (ARM) Network, that CCIP offers over other more complex and less secure cross-chain systems.
“We think this will solve the cross-chain interoperability problem the same way that Chainlink data oracles solved the data problem for DeFi and allowed DeFi to grow into what it is today,” Nazarov said.
He reiterated his belief that CCIP will ultimately enable a global “internet of contracts” that secures the world’s value through a multi-chain ecosystem comprising both public blockchains and private bank chains.
“There’s tens of trillions of liquid value that can flow into the blockchain ecosystem and that liquid value is just now – like right about now – getting put on a bank chain,” he said. “That’s a real opportunity and something we want to facilitate in a secure and reliable way to show the world that they are better off using the blockchain financial system.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full keynote at EthCC.