Last week, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov appeared on CNBC’s Crypto World with host MacKenzie Sigalos to discuss how current events are impacting sentiment among blockchain developers. Speaking from ten years of experience building smart contracts, Nazarov said he continues to see wavering confidence in traditional finance fuel the desire to build better blockchain-based systems.
“People losing faith or having a crisis of faith about traditional financial systems, traditional financial institutions, and their relationship with those institutions – because a 100-plus-year-old institution can basically go out of business or put your deposits at risk – that’s a new and exciting problem for developers to build around,” he said.
“And so I’m seeing even more interest, the more there are these failures. Because people are starting to realize the unique properties of cryptocurrencies, and blockchains, and smart contracts in solving these problems in a way that no other infrastructure can.”
He acknowledged a number of obstacles, including capital and regulatory challenges, that web3 developers must navigate, while pointing out such hurdles are inherent to getting any new industry off the ground.
“I think that the right way to think about the crypto industry is kind of like the crypto Wild West; there are risks and there are opportunities, and people need to measure their opportunities and their risks very carefully,” he explained.
“But this is what it is really in every new industry where something exciting is happening. In the early days of the internet, before anything was clear about how anything was regulated, how anything works, or how anything functioned, people went after opportunities; they took risks and some of those risks panned out, some of them didn’t.”
Ultimately, Nazarov said he believes developers take on an “important role in society” by strategically measuring risks against opportunities in order to innovate from uncertainty to ubiquity.
“Uber was in question at some point. And we Uber places all the time, constantly.”
He said developers know risk and opportunity go hand-in-hand.
“Everyone should weigh those risks with the help of professional advice and go after the opportunities that they feel comfortable taking on – but the opportunities abound and that’s the thing that drives the global economy forward.”
He highlighted Chainlink Labs’ recent partnership with PwC Germany as evidence of mounting interest in blockchain integration among enterprises and capital markets. While the timeline to mainstream blockchain adoption is yet to be seen, Nazarov believes the path is already set in motion, telling Sigalos, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full conversation with MacKenzie Sigalos on CNBC’s Crypto World.