During Sibos 2026, Simon Taylor, Head of Market Development at Tempo, sat down with Andrew McCormick, Head of Institutional and Market Development at Chainlink Labs, to discuss the convergence of TradFi and DeFi, always-on markets, and 24/7 collateral management.
Tempo is a payments-first layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoin financial products, cross-border settlements, and high-throughput enterprise transactions. Co-incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, the network is designed to process global payments at internet-fast speed with predictable sub-cent fees.
Ahead of its official mainnet launch in March, Tempo integrated Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). The recently released CCIP 2.0, as well as Chainlink Data Feeds, are also now live on Tempo.
McCormick highlighted regulatory clarity’s role in advancing institutional blockchain adoption. In 2025, the SEC shifted toward a pro-innovation framework for blockchain and digital assets. This year, the SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, the agency’s first standalone securities offering framework designed specifically for digital assets and crypto investment contracts.
“The regulation piece has been huge. Now firms feel like they can innovate.”
A 2025 no-action letter issued to the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), paved the way for financial institutions to move onchain. DTCC is the primary financial market infrastructure for U.S. capital markets, settling and clearing $20 trillion, or two-thirds of the U.S. GDP, every day.
“When you have big names like that moving into the space, everybody else follows,” McCormick said.
“It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” Taylor agreed.
A 2025 White House Digital Asset Report features Chainlink as a key infrastructure provider advancing tokenized real-world asset (RWA) innovation in the United States. Chainlink also underpins onchain equities and commodities markets by providing data, cross-chain interoperability, compliance, privacy, and orchestration.
This year, Chainlink was selected as the official data and cross-chain oracle infrastructure powering Robinhood Chain, a permissionless, AI-native layer-2 built to connect traditional financial markets to DeFi and tokenized assets such as U.S. stocks and ETFs.
McCormick described a shift away from price and toward infrastructure that enables operational efficiencies in collateral management and 24/7 programmable money.
“Blockchain is getting boring in a good way,” he said.
“People are moving billions of dollars from here to there. That’s not always simple. If you can automate that, reduce your dependencies on humans and human error, there’s a huge uplift.”
The launch of DTCC’s Tokenization Service, which allows eligible DTC participants to tokenize “digital twins” of RWAs, marked another huge industry milestone. DTCC’s tokenized equities possess the same legal rights and investor protections as traditional securities held in custody by the DTC, while offering superior yield, 24/7 movement, and better balance sheet management.
DTCC’s forthcoming Collateral AppChain offers a shared blockchain infrastructure to streamline near-real-time movement, valuation, and settlement of tokenized collateral across global markets. AppChain leverages Chainlink’s data standard and the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a universal orchestration standard for bringing hundreds of trillions in RWAs onchain.
“That movement of collateral and better risk management through smart contracts is an area we’re really pushing toward,” McCormick said.
“Hopefully that’s a win for everybody.”
Watch the full conversation.