Sergey Nazarov: Chainlink Aims to 10x Onchain Money via Better Tokenized Products

Chainlink as the "AWS of onchain finance"

Sergey Nazarov, speaking at Link:NYC, says Chainlink has become hard to describe because it has grown from a data oracle into a layered stack: data, cross-chain connectivity via CCIP, orchestration, and now packaged solutions. He points to Custody Sync, already adopted by Anchorage, which lets custodied assets be mirrored onchain for DeFi use without leaving custody, and Fulcrum, a securities and cash lending product across DeFi and TradFi that uses CCIP and Chainlink's compliance tooling, ACE.

He compares this complexity to Amazon Web Services: most people don't understand what AWS is even though it powers apps they use daily. Nazarov says Chainlink's goal "is not necessarily to make everything completely understandable" to the average person, but to be attractive to the specific users of each solution — custodians, agent lenders, prime brokers, pension funds and asset managers — and to generate revenue that funds further development.

Why tokenized assets need to beat TradFi, not just copy it

Nazarov argues tokenization alone creates no value unless the onchain version is better than the traditional one: "a tokenized fund should be better than a traditional fund." He says that requires 24/7 markets, which in turn require 24/7 data — something traditional exchanges don't provide on weekends. Chainlink has built what he calls "session-aware stitching" that aggregates weekend price sources into a continuous feed.

"You know, that is a little bit, you know, nonsensical." — Sergey Nazarov, on investors being unable to manage risk over weekends under current infrastructure

He adds that settlement and market access should both be faster and more continuous onchain than in TradFi because of CCIP.

Connecting Swift and DTCC, and the bigger cross-border opportunity

Nazarov is careful to note the DTCC's collateral app chain and the Swift ledger are not yet connected, but says if they were, it would make the cash leg and securities leg of traditional markets interoperable, unlocking volume in securities lending, cash lending and repo. He says Chainlink has already implemented much of this technology with partners.

He argues the largest volume opportunity isn't the US system, which is already well served, but international flows: "there is a lot of pent-up liquidity and demand in the Middle East, in Asia, in all kinds of places that can't access each other's assets on traditional rails." He describes a staged path — Chainlink first enabling interoperability within countries, then cross-border connections between hubs like Dubai, Singapore (SGX) and Euroclear, letting capital there reach US assets, something he says doesn't happen today in traditional finance.

Agents, and the push to 10x money onchain

Asked about AI agents, Nazarov previews, for the first time publicly, an unannounced Chainlink product letting agents efficiently use DeFi, securities lending and real-world assets through its CRE environment, with controls set by the human client. He frames agents currently as an interface humans use rather than fully autonomous actors.

On his broader vision, Nazarov says TradFi institutions will remain the holders of client funds, so the task is getting institutional money into tokenized products and making those products demonstrably better — citing yield on tokenized gold, securities lending, and NAV updates "not every day or every week or every month, but every minute" as examples.

"These are all massive improvements that I know are completely possible." — Sergey Nazarov

He says success looks like clients asking their banks for tokenized versions of funds, equities and gold instead of legacy products.