Today at SmartCon, Chainlink’s annual premier web3 conference, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov took the stage at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel to deliver a keynote address. His speech highlighted Chainlink as the industry standard powering decentralized finance (DeFi) and facilitating the convergence of traditional finance (TradFi) with DeFi into a better, more efficient global financial system.
He also revealed the latest major upgrade to Chainlink’s decentralized computing platform: the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) – a unified computing environment that utilizes advanced cryptographic tools to streamline the creation of cutting-edge cross-chain applications.
Nazarov said the goal of CRE is to accelerate TradFi’s web3 adoption the way Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) automated finance in the 1950s and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) brought finance online in the 1990s.
“CRE is built to coordinate the different blockchain technologies, oracle networks, and smart contracts into a single unified application,” he explained.
“This is the thing that we think is missing from all of our interactions with the largest infrastructures, banks, and asset managers. And this is, historically, what has enabled them to build advanced applications: a single environment where they can go and use their existing data, their existing systems, together with the new technology. In the past, that was basic databases and then web databases; now it’s blockchains and smart contracts.”
Chainlink has securely enabled over $16 trillion in onchain transaction value and provides critical services, including a full stack of essential tokenization infrastructure featuring Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), that make it easier for traditional financial institutions to interact with the onchain economy.
As illustrated by Swift’s proof of concept, CCIP allows banks to issue tokenized real-world assets using their existing standards. Over the past year, Chainlink has emerged as the preferred way for top financial institutions including the DTCC, Fidelity International and Sygnum to deliver key net asset value (NAV) and reserve data for tokenized funds onchain.
CRE introduces a flexible, modular, chain-agnostic computing environment that makes it faster and easier to build decentralized applications that are compatible with existing financial systems. Using cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and trusted execution environments (TEEs), CRE allows institutions to bring financial services onchain while protecting users’ private data.
On stage, Nazarov underscored Chainlink’s unique position to provide a solution like CRE, which builds on the platform’s previous collaborations with some of the most prominent figures in global finance.
“What we’ve realized from all of our work with these large institutions is that their model of consuming new technology is to have it simplified for them through a single computational environment,” he explained.
“If we provide the environment to do it, together with the services that they need to build the applications, then I genuinely believe that not only will we enable this next economic boom, but we will be at the very epicenter of it.”
CRE is currently available for early access, with a full release anticipated in 2025.
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full keynote address at SmartCon 2024.