Today in Brussels at EthCC, the largest annual European Ethereum event, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov delivered a keynote address outlining the growth of Chainlink-powered tokenized real-world assets and key use cases accelerating the path toward reformatting the world’s value onchain.
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink has enabled over $12 trillion in transaction value and provides a comprehensive set of services that are critical for creating and securing tokenized assets throughout the multi-chain economy. As illustrated by Swift’s proof of concept, CCIP allows traditional financial institutions to transact with a wide range of private and public blockchains using their existing infrastructure.
“Chainlink is the only platform that has all of this in one system and where all of it can interoperate to create a safe, reliable application,” Nazarov said. “That’s why we power the majority of DeFi.”
Because the amount of new value flowing into blockchains and blockchain applications is what determines the web3 industry’s success, he believes the value stored within traditional finance (TradFi) and capital markets simply “can’t be ignored” by web3 developers.
“All of this value – literally hundreds of trillions in value – is now getting integrated into blockchains, and I think the wise move is to find ways that your applications can interact with that value,” he explained.
Nazarov shared several recent examples of how Chainlink is facilitating this shift.
In May, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a leading financial market infrastructure, announced the results of its Smart NAV industry pilot, which leveraged DTCC’s digital asset capabilities and Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) to demonstrate how traditional financial institutions can deliver key mutual fund data onchain.
Last week, at Point Zero Forum in Zurich, Switzerland, Chainlink announced a collaboration with Fidelity International and Sygnum to bring net asset value (NAV) data for Fidelity International’s $6.9 billion Institutional Liquidity Fund onchain.
Speaking to EthCC’s developer audience, Nazarov emphasized his belief that the cryptocurrency value stored in public blockchains could double and still constitute a fraction of the value within TradFi and capital markets that can ultimately be tokenized onchain.
He explained Chainlink’s primary goal is to create a single standard that unites DeFi and TradFi within a single global internet of contracts and advised developers to “create great DeFi applications that appeal to the DeFi ecosystem” while reserving space within their applications to interact with traditional markets.
“That should be a consideration, because the amount of retail demand eventually will be dwarfed by the amount of capital markets/TradFi demand – and that demand will want to use your applications and will want to interact with your user base,” he said.
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full EthCC keynote.