In an interview with Cointelegraph filmed during Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit in New York, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov explained how strong bipartisan support for the blockchain industry can accelerate American web3 leadership.
Having recently addressed the President at the White House Crypto Summit, Nazarov described an “extremely positive” atmosphere in Washington and a “united effort” to bring America up to speed with the world’s most crypto-forward countries.
“I think crypto will actually be one of the few issues that the Republicans and Democrats can agree on now as being very positive for the economy and positive for the U.S. financial system,” he said.
This is critical, because the U.S. doesn’t have the head start it had in the early days of the internet.
“Blockchain infrastructure is an equalizing force, so the U.S. really has to push its other two advantages of a very strong domestic market and the ability to create these highly reliable financial assets,” Nazarov said.
He believes the future of crypto will ultimately be defined by tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Following the launch of BlackRock’s first tokenized fund last year, Chainlink has been central to growing interest in fund tokenization as the most widely adopted onchain data provider.
“We’ve seen a huge acceleration in the value that’s flowing into tokenized funds and in the amount of tokenized funds,” he said.
The benefits of RWAs – fractionalization, atomic settlement, and programmability alongside better liquidity, transparency, and risk management – are so great that Nazarov expects virtually all of the world’s value will eventually be reformatted into a superior state onchain.
“The mathematics are inescapable,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious to me that our industry is going to be defined by these real-world assets – by volume, by value amount, by total value, by AUM, by whatever metric you want. And at that point, this industry will no longer be about cryptocurrency; it’ll be about these RWAs.”
To become a dominant force in web3, he said the U.S. needs to issue the most abundant, reliable RWAs onchain, then automate compliance so they can be adopted around the world.
“If you’ve created the best asset and you’ve made it the easiest to manage and acquire and resell, you’re in a very good position to actually gain share in the global financial system.”
Watch the full interview.