This week in Washington, D.C., Chainlink hosted an invite-only event with U.S. government representatives to discuss American blockchain policy and financial system innovation.
Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov sat down with the recently appointed Counselor to the Secretary of Treasury for Digital Assets, Tyler Williams, as well as Kristopher Klaich, Director of Policy for The Digital Chamber, in front of an audience of policy experts to outline key technology and policy decisions that could bring the U.S. to the forefront of web3 innovation.
Williams highlighted the new administration’s “aggressive time frame” to recover from a period of “regulatory morass” on digital assets.
“I see all of the pieces of the puzzle moving in one direction, which is to advance the U.S. leadership on digital assets, and that is a wholesale change of where we’ve been over the last several years,” he said.
Nazarov believes the path to American leadership in blockchain adoption is through tokenizing assets onchain.
“The U.S. does have the largest collection of reliable high-quality assets,” he said. “You fundamentally want the base asset that then can be rewrapped, and restated, and reshipped in 20 different ways to 20 different places – you want the fundamental value to originate in the U.S. financial system.”
The next step is creating regulatory clarity that eliminates friction, automates transactions, and makes it easy to acquire American tokenized assets around the world.
“That will allow the U.S. to retain this key leadership position in the global financial system,” said Nazarov.
Beyond facilitating cross-border transactions with USD-denominated stablecoins, Nazarov pointed to tokenizing high-yield, low-risk assets such as U.S. Treasuries as a popular use case for diversifying blockchain investments.
“The public blockchain world is willing to pay a significant premium for diversification,” he said.
As the standard for onchain finance, Chainlink has enabled over $19 trillion in transaction value and provides essential infrastructure for securing tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and stablecoins. Proof of Reserve (PoR) is particularly important for stablecoins because it cryptographically proves in real time that onchain assets are fully collateralized.
Williams described bipartisan interest in technology like onchain proof of reserves.
“I think it may end up being one of the great use cases that Washington wakes up and sees,” he said. “If you can cryptographically prove that you have custody and ownership over the assets that you say you do, and you can do it in a very real-time instantaneous manner, that’s pretty powerful. And you can see how that would be transposed into many different aspects of traditional finance as well.”
When it comes to formulating American stablecoin policy, the goal is to uphold the same high standards that have made the U.S. a leader in global finance.
“We want to be a net producer of the rules and the outcomes, from a regulatory policy lens, versus a taker,” Williams said.
Watch the full conversation.