This week during Solana Accelerate in New York City, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with FINTECH.TV’s Remy Blaire to discuss how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks access to over $19 billion worth of assets on Solana and why the new crypto-positive regulatory landscape accelerates real-world asset tokenization.
“The launch of CCIP on Solana is pretty significant because it’ll allow public chain liquidity and usage to flow into the Solana ecosystem, but it will also allow institutional value and liquidity to interact with Solana-based applications,” Nazarov said.
CCIP now supports 57+ blockchains. Solana is the first non-EVM chain to employ the latest CCIP v1.6 upgrade, which enhances cost-effective scaling to hundreds of additional blockchains.
Nazarov explained how CCIP and CRE, the Chainlink Runtime Environment, are facilitating global web3 adoption by bringing compliant institutional capital onchain.
“The tokenization of the global financial system is going to be the final thing that enables our industry to go mainstream,” he said.
“I’ve never seen the U.S. government or other governments all over the world more positive on creating permissive, proactive acceleration of our industry. That’s going to unlock a lot of institutional capital, a lot of institutional-grade tokenized equities, commodities, funds, and that’s going to be the next iteration of our industry.”
Tokenized real-world assets impart numerous benefits including atomic settlement and fractionalized ownership, opening up entire new asset classes to retail investors.
“There are a lot of things in the institutional banking sector and private equity sector and institutional asset management world that are’t available or accessible to the retail investor, and part of the reason for that is because the infrastructure and the cost of making that available is so high,” Nazarov explained.
He anticipates lowered cost and complexity will lead to an “explosion of innovative financial products” with broader accessibility.
“All of these advantages that the institutional investor has I think will be equalized down so the retail investor also has them.”