This year’s SmartCon, Chainlink’s annual premier web3 conference, will take place October 30-31 at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel. Over 100 expert speakers, including blockchain industry pioneers and leaders from the world’s largest financial institutions, will gather to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a better, more efficient global financial system.
For the first time, SmartCon will feature a dedicated banking and capital markets stage, where some of the most influential figures in global finance will showcase how they’re bringing the world’s value onchain.
First-time SmartCon capital markets speakers will include:
- Whikie Liu, Capital Market Strategy Director at Swift
- Stephanie Lheureux, Head of Digital Assets at Euroclear
- Ronit Ghose, Global Head, Future of Finance at Citi
- Emma Pecenicic, Head of Digital Propositions & Partnerships APACxJ at Fidelity International
- Andrew Crawford, Vice President, Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton
- Robert Porter, Director, Digital Asset Services at ANZ
- Rajeev Tummala, Head of Data & Digital, Asia & MENA at HSBC Securities Services
As the industry-standard decentralized computing platform, Chainlink offers a comprehensive set of services that have enabled over $15 trillion in transaction value and provide critical infrastructure for scaling onchain finance to billions of global users. This year, Chainlink has been at the forefront of a potential $867 trillion market opportunity for moving assets onchain.
Following the launch of BlackRock’s BUIDL in March, Chainlink has been central to TradFi’s growing interest in fund tokenization.
In May, the DTCC collaborated with 10 of the world’s largest financial institutions to demonstrate how Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) can bring critical net asset value (NAV) data onchain. In June, Chainlink announced a collaboration with Fidelity International and Sygnum to bring NAV data for Fidelity International’s $6.9 billion Institutional Liquidity Fund onchain.
ANZ, one of the largest institutional banks in Australia; Euroclear, a major FMI custodying more than €36 trillion of assets; and Citi, the third-largest banking institution in the U.S. by assets, were among a dozen banks and FMIs that collaborated with Swift to develop a CCIP-powered blockchain interoperability model allowing TradFi institutions to securely transfer tokenized real-world assets between public and private blockchains using their existing infrastructure.
In an interview for Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” spotlight series late last year, Euroclear’s Stephanie Lheureux underscored the importance of infrastructure like CCIP that unites tokenization islands and seamlessly brings traditional banks onchain. “They already have a system which is working well,” she said. “We need to be able to leverage that and make them interoperate with the new world.”
Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov envisions this new world as a global internet of contracts wherein Chainlink enables virtually all value to be reformatted into a superior state onchain. In his event preview, Chainlink Labs Director of Community Rory Piant described SmartCon 2024 as “Sibos meets Devcon” where attendees can experience this monumental shift in global finance firsthand.
To learn more, register, and stay up to date on speakers and itineraries, visit the official SmartCon 2024 website.