In a new video, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov explained why he’s excited for 2026.
“After well over 15 years of technology development, our industry has reached the point where it can deliver on rebuilding the entire global financial system. All of the building blocks are now there.”
One critical building block is the GENIUS Act, which established the first federal guardrails for USD-pegged stablecoins. Nazarov was at the White House to witness the landmark bill signed into law last July.
By accelerating institutional stablecoin adoption, the GENIUS Acts expands purchasing power for trillions of dollars in tokenized real-world assets such as equities, commodities, and funds.
In 2026, Nazarov anticipates a historic crypto market structure bill will have an even greater impact on digital asset adoption.
“That bill will create a next stage for the global financial system as a whole by allowing the tokenization of everything other than cash,” he explained.
One of CoinDesk’s 2025 Most Influential names in crypto, Nazarov earned praise for Chainlink’s collaboration with dozens of major financial institutions and the United States Department of Commerce on critical use cases from standardizing corporate actions data to delivering U.S. government macroeconomic data onchain.
He embarked on 2025 with a commitment to accelerating government and central bank adoption – a prediction CoinDesk deemed “far less ambitious and a lot closer to reality” as the year came to a close.
Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure secures the vast majority of DeFi and has facilitated over $27 trillion in transaction value. In 2025, Chainlink launched its institutional-grade data publishing service, DataLink. The Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts, also went live.
In 2026, Chainlink plans to enhance CRE with a novel confidential compute service that connects real-world financial data and web2 systems across chains while keeping proprietary data, business logic, external connectivity, and computation confidential. Nazarov believes private smart contracts are “the last big missing piece” needed to bring global finance onchain.
He predicts digital assets will continue to gain recognition as a superior asset class that promotes global liquidity and connectivity with less friction, cost, and complexity.
“It is now a foregone conclusion in the traditional finance community,” he said.
Calling 2025 “a job well done,” he outlined a path for 2026 and beyond.
“If we do the right things this year, then the Chainlink ecosystem can be the global standard – not only for DeFi but also for TradFi. Then, in the coming years, we’ll have an exciting challenge of joining the DeFi industry and the TradFi industry into a single, global, highly interconnected industry: the new global financial system.”
Watch the full video.