Last week, global financial messaging provider Swift announced it will collaborate with over a dozen top financial institutions to transact with a variety of blockchains via Chainlink Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). To highlight the significance of this integration, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Real Vision host Ash Bennington to envision the future of global finance.
Nazarov explained how CCIP could accelerate society’s shift toward trust-minimization as the new minimum standard for systems and applications.
“I think that decentralization is going to become the minimum standard for everybody because it provides superior security; it provides superior transparency; and it provides superior control of assets by end users,” he said.
“I believe that everybody will realize that the entire system that doesn’t give them control of their assets, doesn’t give them clarity about the risks taken with their assets, and doesn’t give them an ability to know what’s going on, will be eventually viewed as legacy and suboptimal.”
He described the shift towards decentralization and trust-minimization in terms of objective value over subjective ideology.
“It won’t be my ideological view, or your ideological view, or the bank’s ideological view; it’ll be the actual value of decentralization to end users,” he said. “At the end of the day, even if you don’t understand the ideology behind it, you still get the value.”
Nazarov defined web3 as a spectrum of trust-minimized applications that become increasingly decentralized through technology like Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve (PoR), which cryptographically proves the collateralization of on-chain assets by cross-chain or off-chain assets in near real time.
“I think what’s going to happen is that everyone is going to move up the spectrum to become as trust-minimized as possible, as long as the infrastructure and the systems allow them to do that,” he said.
He believes the shift towards trust-minimization will gradually close the gap between traditional and decentralized finance until they become one superior system.
“I see the bank capital markets world that basically has hundreds of trillions of dollars in value sloshing around in there realizing that bank transactions can be on blockchains and the properties of blockchains are positive and the clients want to do these transactions,” he said.
“And what I see happening is that these two worlds will eventually overlap, similarly to how the internet has everybody on it. The internet has small startups; the internet has big banks; the internet has everybody.”
Just as TCP/IP facilitated a globally connected internet, Nazarov sees CCIP enabling the world’s shift toward an “internet of contracts.”
“You will have a single standard for that connection and that is what CCIP is meant to be; it’s meant to be, similarly to TCP/IP, the way that you connect all of these different blockchains whether they’re public or private. And so that world of an internet of contracts is where I think web3 will end up.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full conversation with Ash Bennington on Real Vision Crypto.