Last week, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a new DeFi protocol backed by the 45th President and current President-elect, Donald Trump, announced it will adopt Chainlink’s industry-leading decentralized oracle services for onchain price data and cross-chain interoperability.
To elaborate on how Chainlink empowers projects like WLFI to expand DeFi’s user base, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and WLFI co-founder Zak Folkman joined Kristen Scholer for an interview on NYSE TV.
“Chainlink has been powering the first generation of DeFi since the whole industry launched,” Nazarov said. “World Liberty Financial is a very good example of one of the top teams that is seeking to grow the DeFi market into the mainstream.”
WLFI plans to launch on leading liquidity protocol Aave, which has been secured by Chainlink Price Feeds since its inception. Price Feeds leverage Chainlink’s time-tested oracle network to deliver highly reliable price data onchain, even during volatile market conditions and adverse events such as flash loan attacks. Having enabled over $16 trillion in transaction value, Price Feeds are the leading oracle solution for hundreds of DeFi protocols with billions of dollars in TVL, as well as traditional financial institutions that are tokenizing assets onchain.
“We’re really looking forward to working with Chanlink,” Folkman said. “For us, security was one of the most important considerations when we were picking a provider. As World Liberty Financial aims to onboard the next generation of web3 users and bridge people over who are already existing in a web2 world, it’s important that we have a solution that can communicate with other institutions that exist outside of our crypto bubble.”
One of WLFI’s stated goals is “safeguarding the global status of the US dollar” by promoting stablecoin adoption. Beyond Price Feeds, the project plans to adopt additional Chainlink services, such as Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), which are essential for securing stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) onchain.
As illustrated by Swift’s proof of concept, CCIP allows traditional financial institutions to tokenize RWAs that can transact with the multi-chain economy using existing infrastructure and messaging standards.
“We believe that CCIP in particular is the only solution with proven use cases with messaging systems like Swift,” said Folkman. “Chainlink’s previous work can empower us to accelerate our road map by piggybacking off of work they’ve already done within the traditional financial world.”
Nazarov envisions Chainlink as a universal platform for tokenizing RWAs that serve as unified golden records and uniting TradFi with DeFi into a global internet of contracts. Following U.S. regulators’ approval of spot bitcoin ETFs earlier this year in what industry experts including Nazarov called a watershed moment for crypto, he believes improving regulation and DeFi’s user experience will continue to drive adoption.
“I think there’s a big consumer trend coming and I think great teams like World Liberty Financial have a very good chance of really capturing a big part of that trend,” he said.
Watch the full interview.