On the latest episode of the Crypto in America podcast hosted by Jacquelyn Melinek, Gerald Gallagher, and Eleanor Terrett, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov explained why he believes institutional blockchain adoption is the inevitable future of U.S. and global finance.
Having recently addressed the President at the first White House Crypto Summit, Nazarov asserted that the new executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve alongside pending stablecoin and market structure legislation shows the U.S. is moving quickly to course correct on blockchain and crypto innovation.
“This is a completely fixable and salvageable situation, and the U.S. regulators are doing now, I think, a very good job moving things in the right direction,” he said. “It’s really night and day.”
Nazarov has made multiple trips to D.C. this year, beginning with a series of inauguration weekend events including the first Inaugural Crypto Ball.
In February, he met with U.S. government representatives including Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence, Bryan Steil, and Counselor to the Secretary of Treasury for Digital Assets, Tyler Williams, to discuss American blockchain policy.
In March, he joined the U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer on stage at the DC Blockchain Summit to examine the new administration’s push to drive global blockchain and digital asset adoption.
“We definitely have a foothold in D.C.,” Nazarov said. “We will be even more active in D.C., because the U.S. is a super-regulator that will shape our industry – not just in the U.S., but globally.”
He believes institutional blockchain adoption has already reached escape velocity.
“As far as I’m concerned, we won,” he said. “The only thing holding us back at this point, in my opinion, is that the U.S. institution is highly sensitive to compliance.”
Once the risks of compliance are reduced or eliminated, the benefits of onchain finance, such as atomic settlement and real-time audits, will be too great to be ignored.
“If there are systems that allow them to comply with a thoughtfully crafted set of rules that actually makes it cheaper and less risky for them to do a transaction of a tokenized equity than it does to do a traditional equity transaction, they will shift to doing all of their transactions in tokenized assets,” he explained.
“Because we can programmatically define and manage risk in the blockchain industry much better than in the traditional industry.”
Watch the full episode.