At this week’s Solana Breakpoint event, Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko to talk about how Solana’s mainnet integration of Chainlink oracles will catalyze the next generation of hybrid smart contracts and where the entire DeFi industry is headed in 2022.
Sub-Second Synergy
Solana’s unique blockchain architecture reduces the cost and latency of information transmission to maximize information symmetry around the world and create open access to global markets and price data. Nazarov said Solana’s scalability presents both an “opportunity and challenge” that Chainlink’s decentralized oracle networks are optimized to meet.
Chainlink comprises the largest collection of market data sources that deliver information at sub-second speeds into various blockchains. Since Chainlink Price Feeds went live on Solana Devnet in August, Nazarov said Chainlink has already been able to achieve sub-second data delivery. “Generally speaking, I think it’s all very much on track,” he said.
A Seismic Shift
Yakovenko said that the synergy between Chainlink’s oracles and Solana’s blockchain allows Web3 smart contract applications to be built with the same performance, throughput and cost that Web 2.0 users are used to. “This allows DeFi to start penetrating into places that are pretty hard,” he explained.
He said the result is the ability to monetize Web3 without advertising or stealing people’s data. “That is going to end up being a seismic shift from Web2 to Web3. I’m pretty excited to see these early inklings of that happening already.”
Rethinking Status Quo
Though DeFi’s yield may seem inconceivably high, Yakovenko reconceptualized DeFi’s returns as “not crazy, but realistic.”
“This is what people should be getting from their dollars if there weren’t a bunch of middlemen all taking a small bite in the traditional banking system.”
Over the next year, he said he would like to see 100 million new people begin generating yield through DeFi.
“Between the status quo going sideways and there being a better alternative – I think those two things together do convert those couple hundred million people into even the most basic use case,” Nazarov said, speaking to the massive growth of DeFi in the wake of the Robinhood trading freeze last spring.
2022 Vision
Nazarov said he expects to see an increasing number of banks and enterprises extend DeFi capabilities to their customers in 2022. At the same time, he predicts a host of real-world industries will sell their cash flow and collateral into new DeFi markets.
“When everything starts touching the real world in that way from this industry, things are going to take on a very different tone because fundamentally all of these real-world industries need a market,” Nazarov said.
Yakovenko concurred: “That’s an awesome vision. I couldn’t agree more with you.”
Chainlink-powered DeFi is coming to Solana in Q4.
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s fireside chat with Anatoly Yakovenko.