Mm.
Smart 2025 just wrapped up in New York City and plenty of announcements rolling in.
Chain Link unveiling the Chain Link runtime environment letting institutions deploy smart contracts with built-in compliance privacy, as well as data tools across blockchains.
And Danari Chain Link and S&P, Dow Jones Indexes also plan to launch the S&P Digital Markets 50 index on chain later this year.
Meanwhile, UBS. its first live tokenized fund transaction on Ethereum using Chain Links DTA automating fund operations on Jane.
Well, without further ado, joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange is Chain Link co-founder Sergei Nazarov.
Sergey, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Great to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I know that you've been busy with SmartCon the last two days, so first and foremost, tell me about the event and the key takeaways for you.
So I think it was a pretty successful event.
I've heard that from multiple groups.
It really had 3 groups.
It had the crypto community, it had the Defi community, and it had the tradfi community, and that's really what Chain Link as an ecosystem is about now is it's bringing those 3 communities together and allowing them to interoperate and work together so that you know there's kind of mutual success.
There there was a lot of announcements from users of Chain Link.
There was a lot of great stuff going on.
With the actual expansion of the chain link system and protocol and so I think it was a pretty successful conference.
That's what I've heard from for most people and our goal with the conference really is to allow people to Kind of form relationships across these groups because our really strong belief within the chain link kind of community is that the cryptocurrency community and the DFI community and the traditional financial community are in the process now of merging into the new financial system, and we really want to encourage that in every way we can.
Yeah, and when you take a step back, I'm sure you're looking at everything that unfolded and still digesting this as all of us are, but when it comes to the announcements, we've been hearing all the announcements, but what are the impacts of these announcements?
So there's really two categories of announcements.
There are product announcements.
So how is chain link improving, changing, what new capabilities are there?
The chain link runtime environment was made live and available.
Chain Link privacy and Chain Link confidential compute was something we released a white paper on and something we planned to make available within the chain link runtime environment, you know, basically towards the end of and early next year.
So the product announcements were really quite big because I think the chain link runtime environment opens up this new chapter and then the the user announcements were very varied, right?
So we had announcements with multiple central banks.
We had announcements with top tier commercial banks like UBS using the transfer agency standard.
We had lots of folks there from existing users like JPMorgan.
And DTCC and SWIFT all speaking and talking about you know their experience utilizing the chain link standard and really chain link has become so many different things now.
It provides data, connectivity across chains, identity, access to AI, you know, a whole bunch of different capabilities and the use cases are also pretty varied now.
So you know the variety of use cases that chain link enables extends all the way to even trade flows.
So for example, there were two central banks, the Hong Kong Central Bank and the Brazil Central Bank, that executed a trade flow using Chain Link cross chain CCIP and the CRE, the chain link runtime environment, together with Inter, the largest bank in Brazil.
And that was for for trade.
That was for global trade flows, not just tokenization and not just, you know, funds and not just stable coins.
Even though chain link tower is a lot of stablecoins and funds, so I think the variety of use cases shows that many different parts of the financial system are starting to go unchanged.
And Sergey, everything that you just highlighted there just speaks to the fact that 2025 has It's been quite a year when it comes to this space and of course we're here on Wall Street at the New York Stock Exchange and we're talking chain link.
But recently you were down in the nation's capital in Washington DC, so give us an understanding of what's unfolding there despite the government shutdown.
I think that the Democrats and the Republicans both have a very strong motivation.
To get the bill done, the clarity and market structure bill, I think the shutdown is affecting that a little bit, but there's really a lot of discussions that are still happening.
What's going to be important is that once they are ready to move ahead, that the shutdown has concluded and there's no more shutdown.
So I still think there's progress being made.
I think there's a lot of incentive for both sides because I think we've finally gotten to a place where the folks in DC understand what we've been kind of explaining to them now for a while.
That our industry is not just about highly speculative coins and it's also not just about the centralized finance, it's actually about the next iteration of the financial system.
And one of the US's key factors for success globally is its dominant role in the global financial system.
And so if blockchain technology, Oracle, smart contracts are the next iteration of the financial system, then everyone in DC should be very concerned with how that technology is implemented.
And that it isn't implemented offshore, but that it's implemented within the United States, which is now I think the realization they have and it gives the market structure bill a different level of importance where it's not just about the cryptocurrency industry and it's not just about the centralized finance, it's also about the US financial system and its future.
So that I think is creating a lot of momentum.
Yeah, and speaking of momentum, we are heading into the end of the year.
Hard to believe, but 2026 is right around the corner.
So for viewers out there who are watching this, are trying to get a better understanding, better grasp of what all of this means, your vision for the future of finance, can you walk us through this for not just institution but also for retail investors heading into the new year and beyond?
I think our industry is really evolving from what it was earlier on, which is focused on cryptocurrency.
I have this analogy that always seems to clarify things about the internet, where email was the first use case of the internet, and there was a time when you would mention email and people would say the internet or you mention the internet and people say your email, and they were synonymous, right, because the email, a use case was the defining use case or the only real use case of the internet at that time.
And that's what cryptocurrency is for our industry.
But now, just like the internet, our industry is going to expand into these many other use cases tokenization, decentralized finance, tokenized funds, stablecoins, you know, global trade flows, all these things.
And so just like the definition and understanding of the internet expanded beyond the email, now it's going to expand into these other categories of what what the blockchain blockchain industry will be used for.
And that presents certain opportunities because the firms that focused on cryptocurrencies are not sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't the firms that are going to really be important for this next stage of the industry.
So I think our industry is going to expand to cover, you know, a lot of what goes on here at the New York Stock Exchange and what goes on all over the world in global finance.
Well, Sergei, it was a pleasure having you on the show.
We will have to leave it there for today, but hopefully you'll be back before we know it.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
