SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Stefan Rust is the founder and CEO of Truflation, a leading provider of real-time financial data whose decentralized U.S. inflation index delivers its data onchain via Chainlink. Rust sat down with Malandrino to discuss the advantages of real-time economic data and the near-limitless potential to create new data indices as alternative tools to analyze markets.
Rust distilled two core advantages of Truflation’s data.
“Number one is you can make faster investment decisions based on the real-time data that you have; it’s predictive compared to the government numbers, so you’re 30 days ahead of where the government numbers are coming out at,” he explained.
“The second element is around interest rate decision-making; how can we use real-time data sets to impact inflation and interest rates and what do we need to do around that and how do we leverage that?”
Truflation currently tracks around 100 million data sets. As the DeFi landscape continues to evolve around new tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), Rust said Truflation is helping to build out synthetic assets, perpetual trading capabilities, and futures contracts that can be traded on both decentralized and centralized exchanges.
The goal of continuous, transparent price data is to make markets more efficient while giving businesses and consumers the information needed to fight inflation and decreased purchasing power by sourcing more affordable products and services.
Truflation’s permissioned platform now allows anyone to create indices uniquely tailored to specific investment strategies. For example, investors can curate indices that measure the aggregate performance of RWAs, sectors, or even personal values.
Recently, Truflation announced the launch of the Deadlift Index, based on research which stipulates that CEOs who lift weights outperform those who don’t on the S&P 500, and the AI Index designed to track AI company performance and the RWAs driving generative AI.
“You could come up with a yoga index, you could come up with a vegan index – we’ve had really very creative ideas leveraging price feeds from commodities, to goods that you buy at the retail outlet, to temperature,” Rust explained. “Anybody can create all these different types of indexes and ultimately they can then get traded on prediction markets or on exchanges.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Stefan Rust.