On a recent episode of Chainlink’s “The Future Is On” series, Grayscale’s Head of Product and Research, Rayhaneh Shariff-Askary, and Chainlink Labs’ President of Banking and Capital Markets, Fernando Vazquez, examined how blockchain, crypto, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets are shaping the next phase of financial market structure onchain.
Shariff-Askary and Vazquez agreed that increasing regulatory clarity in the U.S. is accelerating digital asset adoption. Last year, the GENIUS Act, which established the first federal guardrails for USD-pegged stablecoins, was signed into law. In 2026, a long-awaited crypto market structure bill is poised to have an even greater impact on tokenization.
“Something as simple as the biggest economy in the world bringing that regulatory clarity made it possible to have the right incentives for banks, asset managers, and other stakeholders,” Vazquez explained.
Digital assets impart numerous benefits including cost savings, faster settlement, fractionalization, and composability.
“When you tokenize something, DeFi enables it to become a productive asset,” said Shariff-Askary.
“You can borrow against it. You can reuse it. It can be put to work across a broader range of financial applications.”
She explained institutional investors want exposure to digital assets in familiar wrappers with clear regulatory guardrails. Creating analogues helps traditional finance “cut through the noise” in the world of digital assets.
Vazquez highlighted BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF as a key milestone in expanding the public perception of blockchain’s potential to transform traditional financial infrastructure.
“People started to realize that blockchain can actually become the new rails or the new plumbing for financial markets and payments. And people want to get exposure to that. They want to share the upside or potential upside of blockchain becoming the de facto standard.”
Chainlink’s highly resilient oracle infrastructure secures the vast majority of onchain finance and has facilitated over $28 trillion in transaction value. A 2025 report from Grayscale describes Chainlink as “critical connective tissue” for bridging crypto with the traditional financial world.
“We at Chainlink, in partnership with the likes of Swift, JP Morgan, UBS, and others, have proven that you can organically grow into a blockchain-powered future,” said Vazquez.
“You don’t need to drop all your mainframes and core banking systems to do something meaningful with blockchain. You can actually initiate an onchain transaction using your legacy systems.”
Last year, the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) – a universal orchestration layer for building end-to-end institutional-grade smart contracts – officially went live. Designed to dramatically accelerate the rate at which institutional capital can flow onchain, CRE is built to capture tokenization’s $867 trillion market opportunity.
“The opportunity before us is still huge,” said Shariff-Askary. “Projects like Chainlink are playing a very critical role in enabling tokenization.”
Chainlink’s Automated Compliance Engine (ACE) – a unified standard for creating compliance-focused digital assets and services across public and private blockchains – is another key to unlocking global financial products that are interoperable across different jurisdictions with different regulations.
“We want to make sure there’s interoperability so that assets aren’t locked on siloed systems and we want to standardize things on robust global settlement infrastructure,” Shariff-Askary explained.
Ultimately, Vasquez believes Chainink’s growing body of work with TradFi giants proves the convergence of traditional and onchain finance can and will happen organically.
“Such financial institutions will be key enablers for blockchain, and those who engage early will be really well positioned to be not just relevant but to thrive.”
Watch the “The Future Is On” episode featuring Grayscale’s Rayhaneh Shariff-Askary and Chainlink Labs’ Fernando Vazquez.