During Sibos 2026, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with Robbie Klages from The Rollup to talk about how this year’s event reflects “massive growth” in the digital assets industry.
“This year, it’s not a controversial topic at all; it’s more about how to implement it,” Nazarov said.
The discussion around more complex topics, such as AI agents’ interaction with stablecoins and tokenized cash, indicates tokenization has already been normalized within traditional finance.
Nazarov said institutions’ interest in Chainlink’s infrastructure is at an all-time high.
“They all need a solution to abstract away the complexity of multiple chains and Chainlink is viewed by the vast majority of them as that chosen solution.”
This is evident in a series of recent announcements.
During Sibos, Chainlink officially launched a connectivity framework that enables global financial institutions to access Swift’s blockchain ledger using the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE). The self-signing solution allows banks to seamlessly execute 24/7 cross-border payments and manage smart contracts using tokenized deposits.
Nazarov and DTCC’s Dan Doney also presented on how DTCC’s Collateral AppChain is leveraging CRE and Chainlink’s data standard to support 24/7 near real-time collateral management across financial markets and blockchains.
“Now is the time where we’re harvesting the fruits of our labor and reaping the real benefits of so consistently, and over so many years, being the reliable provider,” Nazarov said.
He believes these collaborations are possible because the digital assets industry has finally evolved to the place where institutions want to integrate advanced workflows such as collateral management and tokenized deposits.
“They want stuff to work together and people are realizing only Chainlink is able to provide that.”
He views the jump from today’s “moderately advanced workflows” to tomorrow’s fully advanced workflows as a matter of achieving critical mass.
“You need to reach a certain number of partners and providers all working together so that enough banks and enough asset managers and enough pension funds can get the benefit of securities lending for tokenized equity.”
At this point, securities lending will provide real value and tokenized equity will offer better yield, 24/7 movement, and better balance sheet management.
“These are multibillion-dollar savings per bank for larger institutions and hundreds of millions for the medium-size. These are very significant numbers.”
The key is bringing enough of these different market participants onchain.
“What we’re doing now is getting all those market participants on CCIP, CRE, and the Chainlink data standard so they can enable collateral management and movement efficiently. Then the amount of tokenized equity that comes into existence and the wide adoption of it will massively skyrocket.”