During the 2022 Chainlink SmartCon event, September 28-29 in New York City, Nasdaq TradeTalks’ Jill Malandrino hosted a two-day interview lineup at the MarketSite Studio in Times Square with some of the conference’s 100+ expert speakers from the Chainlink ecosystem.
After speaking with Yorke Rhodes III about Microsoft’s evolving web3 strategy, Malandrino sat down with Stefan Rust, the CEO of Truflation, a decentralized U.S. inflation index that delivers its data on-chain via Chainlink. Their conversation examined modernizing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) by bringing independent, censorship-resistant financial and economic data on-chain.
Rust explained how Truflation’s index is engineered to provide a more accurate daily representation of U.S. inflation by using a remastered version of traditional CPI metrics that reference fewer than 100,000 items and have a lag time of several years.
In addition to tracking 18 million items from dozens of sources, Truflation’s data is updated daily and available on-chain through a publicly accessible dashboard.
Rust said this allows anyone to utilize what Truflation refers to as the “true CPI.”
In his view, this amounts to giving consumers more accurate data to assess “real inflation as it impacts us when we go to a gas station, when we go to the grocery store, when we try to fill up our shopping basket” and develop strategies to hedge against loss of purchasing power.
He highlighted the real-world impact of open-source inflation data.
“On Wall Street, people are looking to our data to be able to better forecast what the outcome of inflation is. So we’re building out capabilities to be able to enhance that and support that using AI technologies, because we’ve got ten years of historical data.”
In the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), Rust said developers are using Truflation’s data to build new use cases such as flat coins pegged to the cost of living. Heading toward the future, he said Truflation is focused on expanding its on-chain datasets as well as improving its dashboard’s accessibility to encourage even more innovation.
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Stefan Rust on Nasdaq TradeTalks.