This week, Global Custodian magazine and Chainlink announced their collaboration on a new podcast, “The Future Is On,” dedicated to exploring the future of digital assets in both traditional and decentralized finance.
The series’ first episode features Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, who highlighted numerous benefits of Chainlink-powered tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and explained how such assets would function as unified golden records that establish a superior new data flow onchain.
He said the current financial system’s model, which consists of separate rails for data and payments, leads to disparities that cause systemic failures such as the 2008 Financial Crisis.
“Data is all over the place. Many market participants and regulators and even the issuers, in many cases, don’t have critical information about the asset.”
However, Chainlink’s decentralized oracle services facilitate a new onchain data model that enables RWAs to be inextricably linked to continuously updated key information.
For example, tokenized real estate would be paired with data about ownership and critical factors such as debts or liens.
“This can eliminate all kinds of information asymmetries – huge market dislocations in price and value – and massively reduce risk, especially systemic financial risk,” Nazarov said.
“The type of information that’s only available to certain privileged groups within a bank, or the issuer, or somebody who has to pay huge amounts of money to get that information is now readily and freely available within the asset itself.”
As the standard for onchain finance, verifiable data, and cross-chain interoperability, Chainlink has enabled over $20 trillion in transaction value and provides a comprehensive set of services that are critical for securing RWAs such as carbon credits, private equity, and real estate.
Chainlink Data Feeds deliver accurate, reliable, tamper-proof market data onchain; Proof of Reserve (PoR) continuously verifies that onchain assets are fully collateralized; and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) provides a universal set of rails for RWAs to flow freely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications.
“As the token moves from chain to chain to chain, it retains and actually adds more information to itself so that anybody can understand what the asset is and, more importantly, what the current state of the asset is,” Nazarov said.