During the Barclays Crypto & Blockchain Summit, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Barclays Senior Research Analyst Ramsey El-Assal for a fireside chat about innovations like tokenized real-world assets that are enabled by Chainlink’s essential web3 services such as Proof of Reserve.
Nazarov also shared his observations about how blockchain technology is most likely to achieve mainstream adoption in global finance. He described three main cases for blockchain adoption: cost and efficiency gains, demand for digital assets, and failures in traditional finance.
He posited that the first two scenarios will likely incentivize traditional financial institutions to gradually adopt blockchain solutions over time, while the third scenario – in which bank failures instigate crises of faith – could prove to be the fast case for blockchain adoption.
He explained, “If there’s a crisis of faith, then the question is ‘How do you restore faith?’ And my very strong view is that you restore faith through encryption technologies, which is what blockchains and oracles and smart contracts are.”
In other words: the solution to a loss of trust is trust-minimization. Nazarov predicts the path toward blockchain-based systems and digital assets will accelerate as more people confront the fallibility of brand guarantees.
“Counterparty risk management through digital assets doesn’t really seem valuable until counterparty risk becomes more real as it recently has,” he explained.
He said banks and institutions that create a digital asset capability “will be well prepared” for the possibility that digital assets become viewed as the “less risky form” of asset ownership, concluding, “All the banks that have the capacity to provide that might become very, very attractive overnight.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full conversation with Ramsey El-Assal at the Barclays Crypto & Blockchain Summit.