A little more than a month since SmartCon 2022, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Real Vision host Ash Bennington to expound on how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is poised to facilitate a surge in hyperconnected smart contract applications.
Nazarov described CCIP in layman’s terms and explained its role in the evolution of web3 with historical context from web2, where information exchange and composability gave rise to popular applications like Uber and Netflix.
“The same thing is happening in our industry now, where basically you’re going to have multiple different parts of an application distributed across multiple different chains, just like multiple different parts of a web application are distributed across multiple clouds,” he said.
“What CCIP does is it creates a very basic communications protocol for the blockchain industry so that chains can communicate,” he continued. “The internet allows you to use any part of the internet, wherever it’s housed and whatever cloud and whatever system, and what CCIP does is it allows that connectivity to happen between chains and to create cross-chain applications.”
Nazarov envisions the cross-chain applications of the future will optimize different blockchains for different features and utilities like security, computation, and user interface. He sees this shift happening similarly to how applications have integrated multiple oracle networks. “Now you might see applications that use multiple oracle networks and multiple chains all at the same time,” he said.
“CCIP is really at the core of how all of this transmission of information and commands and tokens will happen. And I think it’s something very exciting and important, because it’s just the tip of the iceberg right now with token movement. That’s just the very beginning.”
The idea that information transmission “generally predates large explosions in what applications can do” was at the heart of Nazarov’s SmartCon fireside chat with Chainlink advisor and former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.
Nazarov said Schmidt – who scaled Google’s growth from startup to tech giant and developed essential web2 products like Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome – is keenly aware that “the dynamic of how the architecture of web2 evolved is really not that different” from how web3 will gain the momentum needed to make cryptographically guaranteed systems mainstream.
“I think what Eric and others see is that a reliable world backed by web3 guarantees is actually where we all would like to end up.”
Watch Ash Bennington’s full conversation with Sergey Nazarov.