Sergey and Vipin Spotted on the list of confirmed attendees on Friday the 7th of March’s crypto-summit 2025 called by the Whitehouse is Sergey Nazarov, the co-founder of Chainlink. Sergey saw the writing on the wall for Real World Assets a while ago. Only a few others on the list are advocates for RWA. This includes Chris Giancarlo, a proponent of the Digital Dollar. Many others could swing either way. However they all stand to make lots of money if significant amounts of RWA are tokenized. The total value of RWA is probably north of $300 Trillion globally. A huge sum. If you talk about the amount being traded every year, the amounts can be even more. RWAs are a reference to tokenized real world assets tradeable on chain. The main challenges to the frictionless trading of tokenized RWA are the privacy of transactions, problems with liquidity, the existence of blockchain islands, and the state of infrastructure for trading, settlement, post-trade custody and lifecycle management. This seems like a lot of missing links and capacity. Most of this list can be roughly grouped under interoperability. Automation is another. Chainlink is in the business of interoperability. Chainlink creates and runs infrastructure for oracles. Ancient oracles claim to have precognition, an insight into the future. Women possessed by the gods were oracles, predicting the future in cryptic utterances. Often those predictions are loaded with a twist in their tail, leading to unintended consequences. They are not predictions, but poetic turns of phrase which pass for prediction. Such a prediction appears true unwrapped every which way, after the past future has come to pass and now is the past. Hindsight is 20/20. There are several stories of these utterances leading powerful people who misinterpreted them, to their doom. See the fate of Croesus. Another story about oracles is the one about the Sibyl of Cumae, an oracle. The Sibyl appears in the epigraph of The Wasteland, unable to foretell her own death. Oracles in digital assets are not meant to predict the future. Digital oracles deal strictly with the past. Even if it is the recent past. Chainlink was set up to be a decentralized oracle powered by LINK, a token. LINK prices have gone up a lot since they were issued a few years ago. I interviewed Sergey during Consensus 2024. I have listened to him speak since, on several occasions. This confirms that he is executing on the vision he outlined in our interview almost a year ago. Sergey is also extending that vision to contain the future through mechanisms that control what happens in the future. MORE FOR YOU Lady Gaga Creates Mayhem On ‘Saturday Night Live’ ‘Maximize The Value’—Trump’s Price Plan For Bitcoin, XRP, ETH, SOL And ADA Revealed Northern Lights Forecast: 15 States Could See Aurora Borealis Tonight Our Conversation Sergey and I go back to 2014 or so, when I used to see him at bitcoin and other blockchain meetups in New York City. I had invited him to BNP Paribas where I was working as blockchain strategist and we had a good conversation about where the blockchain space was headed. Especially what a big investment bank such as BNP Paribas could do in this space. This could be taken as a conversation about RWA, since that was the main business of the bank. Banks were not ready then nor are they ready now to handle RWAs. We were both at Consensus 2024 in Austin and sat down for a more detailed discussion. I managed to pretend that it was just Sergey and I, even though we had a couple of minders sitting with us to see that our conversation did not stray into dangerous territory. Sergey got into bitcoin through mining in 2010. He continued to work on smart contracts on early platforms that supported smart contracts such as NXT. Sergey still has an email address that ties him to smartcontracts.com. Smartcontract work led him to oracles. Sergey then invested time in thinking about oracles and how they could be decentralized. Oracles were all about any off chain data that smart contracts need to drive the ledger state change. When Ethereum as the natural home of Smart Contracts appeared, Sergey started building on it. What followed was Chainlink and the spectacular success of the LINK token making Sergey a wealthy man. Next came a way to extend the oracle into the oracle network. The oracle network comes to its own consensus about the quality of the data it is transporting. Chainlink calls this the Decentralized Oracle Network. Off chain for any chain meant data from all external sources, including other chains. Oracles could link chains, making them not only link with external data but with data in other chains. A natural extension was linking with existing messaging systems and data standards such as FIX and Swift. More than the data, it was conditions that wrapped the data that made it very powerful. In other words, links transported data wrapped in smart contracts. Since data can be value as well, means value wrapped in functions are transported. Chainlink gave a name to this protocol. CCIP or the Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol and developed standards for it, including an SDK. The transportation of value and information with links to traditional rails needs tools to swiftly implement basic building blocks and stitch them together. Chainlink started putting these tools together and has a bunch of libraries that help deploy a solution built up with basic capabilities. A capability to tokenize, a capability to regulate the transfer, a capability to report the transfer etc. Let us call this programmable token transfer. The different dimensions of risk control, validated transfer, reporting and logging are thus built into the system. Furthermore the results and steps of the actions are transported back with consensus operating on it. An extension of a governance system for Oracles. I have used data fabric products such as Coherence which cached data along with pre-written functions which validated, aggregated and analyzed the data in situ. Something called grid computing. The filtered, aggregated data and metadata was stored in the same cache. This is very powerful because of its parallelizing and thus scaling capability. The next step to handle this complexity is a robust runtime environment. The Chainlink Runtime Environment was released in late 2024. The CRE can be thought of as an orchestration environment for Interoperability where the basic building blocks can be easily composed into your own workflow. Such a custom workflow can be released into the CRE which will take care of triggering, running, scaling and operating aspects of your workflow. The microservice equivalent of multiple Decentralized Oracle Networks. Build and composition tools like Interactive Development Environments which are aware of capability components will be the next step. This makes building and deploying workflows a natural flow for developers. Crypto Summit 2025 I am happy that Sergey got a chance to talk during the 21 minute Crypto Summit 2025 at the White House. Most of the participants spoke about trading meme coins. If you listen to Sergey carefully, parsing out the extraneous remarks, he talks about transforming the financial system. It is not by substituting the system of payments with bitcoin, but interoperation and automating the backbone of Financial Markets Infrastructure to create what I call dFMI. Decentralized Financial Markets Infrastructure. I agree with what Scott Stornetta says, you cannot be too doctrinaire about decentralization. We must take what we can get and move forward, all the while pushing against recentralization.Spotted on the list of confirmed attendees on Friday the 7th of March’s crypto-summit 2025 called by the Whitehouse is Sergey Nazarov, the co-founder of Chainlink. Sergey saw the writing on the wall for Real World Assets a while ago. Only a few others on the list are advocates for RWA. This includes Chris Giancarlo, a proponent of the Digital Dollar. Many others could swing either way. However they all stand to make lots of money if significant amounts of RWA are tokenized. The total value of RWA is probably north of $300 Trillion globally. A huge sum. If you talk about the amount being traded every year, the amounts can be even more. RWAs are a reference to tokenized real world assets tradeable on chain. The main challenges to the frictionless trading of tokenized RWA are the privacy of transactions, problems with liquidity, the existence of blockchain islands, and the state of infrastructure for trading, settlement, post-trade custody and lifecycle management. This seems like a lot of missing links and capacity. Most of this list can be roughly grouped under interoperability. Automation is another. Chainlink is in the business of interoperability. Chainlink creates and runs infrastructure for oracles. Ancient oracles claim to have precognition, an insight into the future. Women possessed by the gods were oracles, predicting the future in cryptic utterances. Often those predictions are loaded with a twist in their tail, leading to unintended consequences. They are not predictions, but poetic turns of phrase which pass for prediction. Such a prediction appears true unwrapped every which way, after the past future has come to pass and now is the past. Hindsight is 20/20. There are several stories of these utterances leading powerful people who misinterpreted them, to their doom. See the fate of Croesus. Another story about oracles is the one about the Sibyl of Cumae, an oracle. The Sibyl appears in the epigraph of The Wasteland, unable to foretell her own death. Oracles in digital assets are not meant to predict the future. Digital oracles deal strictly with the past. Even if it is the recent past. Chainlink was set up to be a decentralized oracle powered by LINK, a token. LINK prices have gone up a lot since they were issued a few years ago. I interviewed Sergey during Consensus 2024. I have listened to him speak since, on several occasions. This confirms that he is executing on the vision he outlined in our interview almost a year ago. Sergey is also extending that vision to contain the future through mechanisms that control what happens in the future. Our Conversation Sergey and I go back to 2014 or so, when I used to see him at bitcoin and other blockchain meetups in New York City. I had invited him to BNP Paribas where I was working as blockchain strategist and we had a good conversation about where the blockchain space was headed. Especially what a big investment bank such as BNP Paribas could do in this space. This could be taken as a conversation about RWA, since that was the main business of the bank. Banks were not ready then nor are they ready now to handle RWAs. We were both at Consensus 2024 in Austin and sat down for a more detailed discussion. I managed to pretend that it was just Sergey and I, even though we had a couple of minders sitting with us to see that our conversation did not stray into dangerous territory. Sergey got into bitcoin through mining in 2010. He continued to work on smart contracts on early platforms that supported smart contracts such as NXT. Sergey still has an email address that ties him to smartcontracts.com. Smartcontract work led him to oracles. Sergey then invested time in thinking about oracles and how they could be decentralized. Oracles were all about any off chain data that smart contracts need to drive the ledger state change. When Ethereum as the natural home of Smart Contracts appeared, Sergey started building on it. What followed was Chainlink and the spectacular success of the LINK token making Sergey a wealthy man. Next came a way to extend the oracle into the oracle network. The oracle network comes to its own consensus about the quality of the data it is transporting. Chainlink calls this the Decentralized Oracle Network. Off chain for any chain meant data from all external sources, including other chains. Oracles could link chains, making them not only link with external data but with data in other chains. A natural extension was linking with existing messaging systems and data standards such as FIX and Swift. More than the data, it was conditions that wrapped the data that made it very powerful. In other words, links transported data wrapped in smart contracts. Since data can be value as well, means value wrapped in functions are transported. Chainlink gave a name to this protocol. CCIP or the Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol and developed standards for it, including an SDK. The transportation of value and information with links to traditional rails needs tools to swiftly implement basic building blocks and stitch them together. Chainlink started putting these tools together and has a bunch of libraries that help deploy a solution built up with basic capabilities. A capability to tokenize, a capability to regulate the transfer, a capability to report the transfer etc. Let us call this programmable token transfer. The different dimensions of risk control, validated transfer, reporting and logging are thus built into the system. Furthermore the results and steps of the actions are transported back with consensus operating on it. An extension of a governance system for Oracles. I have used data fabric products such as Coherence which cached data along with pre-written functions which validated, aggregated and analyzed the data in situ. Something called grid computing. The filtered, aggregated data and metadata was stored in the same cache. This is very powerful because of its parallelizing and thus scaling capability. The next step to handle this complexity is a robust runtime environment. The Chainlink Runtime Environment was released in late 2024. The CRE can be thought of as an orchestration environment for Interoperability where the basic building blocks can be easily composed into your own workflow. Such a custom workflow can be released into the CRE which will take care of triggering, running, scaling and operating aspects of your workflow. The microservice equivalent of multiple Decentralized Oracle Networks. Build and composition tools like Interactive Development Environments which are aware of capability components will be the next step. This makes building and deploying workflows a natural flow for developers. What do these workflows transport? With built in integration to traditional rails such as Swift and FIX one can see a whole set of RWAs such as bonds, equities, MBS and other credit products being Chainlink’s domain. Issuance, payment, KYC assurance and other capabilities built into the workflows. Although not being able to name names, Sergey told me that Chainlink was working with a host of Central Banks, Commercial Banks and Infrastructure providers. Crypto Summit 2025 I am happy that Sergey got a chance to talk during the 21 minute Crypto Summit 2025 at the White House. Most of the participants spoke about trading meme coins. If you listen to Sergey carefully, parsing out the extraneous remarks, he talks about transforming the financial system. It is not by substituting the system of payments with bitcoin, but interoperation and automating the backbone of Financial Markets Infrastructure to create what I call dFMI. Decentralized Financial Markets Infrastructure. I agree with what Scott Stornetta says, you cannot be too doctrinaire about decentralization. We must take what we can get and move forward, all the while pushing against recentralization. Follow me on LinkedIn. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades