This week at Consensus, the world’s largest and longest-running web3 conference hosted by CoinDesk, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov delivered a keynote outlining Chainlink’s roadmap for connecting DeFi and capital markets into a single global internet of contracts.
Chainlink’s decentralized oracle infrastructure has delivered more than 12 billion data points onchain and enabled over $10.5 trillion in transaction value throughout the web3 economy. 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 and stablecoins capable of scaling onchain finance to billions of global users.
Chainlink Data Feeds continuously update tokenized assets by delivering accurate, reliable, tamper-proof market data onchain; Proof of Reserve (PoR) leverages Chainlink oracles to verify in real time that onchain assets are fully collateralized by cross-chain or offchain assets; and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks new use cases for tokenized assets, such as ANZ’s cross-chain green financial products, by allowing them to flow freely between private bank chains and public DeFi applications.
These essential oracle services combined allow tokenized assets to function as a golden record that collects and maintains critical information about an asset throughout its entire life cycle on virtually any blockchain.
“It’s a single onchain record that houses both the ownership rights and the data attached to the underlying asset, continually updating that smart contract about that asset,” Nazarov explained. “That’s very different from the world today, where updates about assets happen once a year, once a quarter, or once a month – here we’re talking about updates about assets once a second.”
Not only is Chainlink’s decentralized infrastructure vital for creating, securing, and moving tokenized assets; it’s compatible with traditional financial systems.
“Without synchronization with existing infrastructures, you will not reach scale,” said Nazarov. “In order for us to reach hundreds of trillions of dollars in our industry, you need value to flow into our industry in a way that’s synchronized within current infrastructures and current standards.”
This is illustrated by Swift’s proof of concept, which outlined how traditional financial institutions can transact with a wide range of blockchains using their existing infrastructure and CCIP, as well as a recent Smart NAV industry pilot conducted by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a leading financial market infrastructure, which leveraged DTCC’s digital asset capabilities and CCIP to demonstrate how traditional financial institutions can deliver key mutual fund data onchain.
“Fund tokenization is probably one of the biggest categories of real-world assets that’s just now emerging and it’s dependent on critical data like NAV data,” Nazarov explained. “This initial body of work with the DTCC basically moved the information that’s critical for funds to be tokenized onchain. It did that in a way that will work cross-chain and it did it in a way that simplified the management of this critical piece of data across over ten of the world’s largest asset managers.”
He described Chainlink’s work going forward in terms of further dissolving the barriers between TradFi and DeFi. “My view is that this is most easily done by integrating with existing systems and existing standards,” he said.
“What’s needed is not a wholesale replacement of them, but the ability for them to migrate value and to interact with blockchains in an efficient, secure, reliable way,” he concluded. “This is the path that’s going to most easily get all of this value onchain and that’s going to grow our industry past ten trillion into the hundreds of trillions.”