On the latest episode of the Crypto Brief podcast produced by the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined hosts Parth Gargava and Ryan Stuebe to discuss Chainlink’s role in realizing the full potential of tokenization, achieving the highest level of cross-chain security, and building the future of smart contracts.
Nazarov captured the magnitude of the change blockchains, oracles, and smart contracts are bringing to global finance by allowing value to be moved and transacted more securely and reliably without information asymmetries.
“It’s like going from paper to digital,” he explained. “Blockchains are basically reliable digital.”
Chainlink’s decentralized oracle infrastructure has delivered more than 11.5 billion data points onchain and enabled over $9.7 trillion in transaction value. As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink provides a comprehensive set of services that are critical for creating and securing tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) that can scale onchain finance to a billion global users.
“That’s the new world we’re going toward with all assets,” Nazarov said.
He described how multiple Chainlink services work together to power fully transparent, predictable RWAs. Proof of Reserve (PoR), for example, leverages Chainlink oracles to verify in real time that onchain assets are fully collateralized by cross-chain or offchain real-world assets. This allows users to cryptographically determine an asset’s worth on a second-by-second basis versus an annual audit subject to human error.
As illustrated by Swift’s proof of concept, Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) allows traditional financial institutions to transact with a wide range of private and public blockchains using their existing infrastructure, unlocking new markets and use cases for tokenized assets that can flow freely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications in what Nazarov conceptualizes as a single internet of contracts.
“CCIP is like the TCP/IP of blockchains,” he explained. “It creates a single internet of contracts out of all the different blockchain technologies out there and that allows the real-world asset that you make on one bank chain to be purchasable from another bank chain.”
As CCIP unifies liquidity silos across thousands of global blockchains run by fintechs, banks, and asset managers, Nazarov believes traditional finance will expand into creating funds that feature a variety of tokenized assets on different chains with different risks and returns.
“Where we will end up is a very high degree of mass personalization,” he said. In this Chainlink-powered future, funds that historically would have required months and “huge amounts of consumer demand” to create could be generated in minutes without these limitations.
Nazarov underscored what distinguishes Chainlink is the ability to generate new oracle networks on-demand for specific security-related tasks. As a result, CCIP achieves the highest level of cross-chain security by utilizing multiple decentralized oracle networks, including a separate Risk Management Network, to secure a single cross-chain transaction.
This degree of composability paves the way for his ultimate vision of Chainlink as a decentralized computing marketplace where developers can request and receive any data, offchain computation, or connection to any system in a trust-minimized way.
“The fundamental goal of Chainlink is to create a market where all decentralized computation can be delivered for data, compute, connectivity purposes to accelerate what smart contracts do and allow them to be connected to each other in this internet of contracts,” he said.
“Then you can basically build financial products and systems for everything – for insurance, for gaming, for the financial system – in minutes instead of months or years, and that really for me is the true long-term vision of smart contracts.”
Listen to the full episode.