In July, DeFi protocol Aave launched its algorithmic U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, GHO, which surpassed $2.5 million market cap in two days and stands at over $35 million minted to date. This week at Devconnect Istanbul, Aave Founder Stani Kulechov announced that Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) will power cross-chain use cases for GHO. In an on-stage conversation with Chainlink Labs’ Halcyon Price, Kulechov elaborated on Aave’s vision for GHO’s CCIP-powered cross-chain utility.
“It’s kind of fair to say now that there’s going to be a multi-chain future,” Kulechov said. “It already is to some extent; you have these different communities and users are looking into L2s where the transaction costs are lower and you can build amazing products like GMX, for example.”
He explained that beyond bringing GHO to these new communities, Aave’s larger vision involves growing the gross domestic products of its onchain ecosystem to extend DeFi’s reach into people’s day-to-day lives.
“That’s where we think that having CCIP and being able to create the value in a secured network but then reflect the value in an L2 where the costs are lower and get actually GHO into payment use cases is something that we envision,” he said.
CCIP enables cross-chain token movement as well as cross-chain messaging that programmatically affects the outcome of digital assets on their destination chain and enables cross-chain governance. In July, web3 development initiative BGD Labs announced it is integrating CCIP into Aave Governance V3 to future-proof Aave’s multi-chain governance mechanism.
“Even the governance piece is relying on these cross-chain communications, which is really important just from the governance perspective,” Kulechov explained.
He emphasized the Chainlink Network’s role in upholding blockchain’s ideal of data integrity.
“That’s I think where the Chainlink role has been played in the Aave ecosystem and why we’ve been excited about this for years,” he said. “I do believe that if you want to build an efficient system and also a reliable system, that’s where an oracle like Chainlink comes into play.”
Kulechov is also the founder of Lens Protocol, a permissionless, composable, decentralized social graph that simplifies building web3 social platforms. He said Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure will be vital in supporting use cases across decentralized social networks.
“By using, for example, CCIP, you can create an action that happens in another network but you initiate it from the source network and the idea there is just to purely bring more composability and flexibility to what people are building.”
Whether the multi-chain world of the future comprises five, ten, hundreds or thousands of individual blockchain networks, Kulechov believes CCIP is key to unlocking the full spectrum of potential use cases.
“I do think that there’s going to be a lot more innovation happening. If you’re building something related to oracles now and innovating on top of CCIP, I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to build some interesting projects.”
Watch Stani Kulechov and Halcyon Price’s full conversation at Devconnect Istanbul.