SmartCon 2023 featured more than 100 blockchain experts and financial industry leaders including founders of influential protocols in the Chainlink ecosystem. To get a closer look at the future of web3, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino filmed a two-day interview lineup with speakers at this year’s event in Barcelona, Spain.
Truflation CEO Stefan Rust, whose SmartCon presentation explored the rise of flatcoins to protect purchasing power, sat down with Malandrino to talk about why objective onchain price data is critical in today’s tumultuous and inflationary world.
“Truflation runs 24/7,” Rust said. “We update our metrics daily and so it’s always up; you can always get a reliable source of truth associated with inflation metrics.”
Engineered to be a more accurate alternative to the notoriously lagging Consumer Price Index (CPI), Truflation’s crypto-native index substitutes over half of the current CPI datasets with recent market prices for rent, utilities, food, and transportation to provide a better daily reflection of consumer budgets and spending habits.
Continuous, transparent price data would ideally make markets more efficient while giving businesses and consumers the information needed to fight decreased purchasing power by sourcing more affordable products and services.
“We aggregate 18 million items, three price feeds per item, and we put that on the blockchain,” Rust explained when asked why the average consumer should trust Truflation.
“We disclose the sources where we aggregate and pull the data from. We disclose the methodology that we use to calculate all of that and it’s ultimately maintained by multiple node operators on the Chainlink Network.”
Rust said his biggest takeaway from SmartCon 2023 is the excitement for tokenized real-world assets enabled by Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
“We’re seeing a big opportunity in real-world assets,” he told Malandrino. In addition to aggregating data for commodities, precious metals, supply chains, housing markets, labor markets, and transportation data, Rust said Truflation is also focused on indexation, with plans to launch a proprietary electric vehicle (EV) index tracking commodities for EV batteries according to the supply of EV cars.
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Stefan Rust.