Sergey Nazarov

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 Nazarov, the co-founder of Chainlink, was among the confirmed attendees at the White House's crypto-summit 2025 on Friday, March 7th.

While many attendees were focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, Nazarov highlighted the importance of Real World Assets (RWA).

Also spotted on the list of confirmed attendees is Chris Giancarlo, a heating figure in the digital asset space and a known proponent of the Digital Dollar.

The potential for massive gains in the burgeoning RWA market could swing the tide in favor of this asset class. With an estimated total value of RWA exceeding $300 Trillion globally, the possibilities for profiatble ventures seem endless.

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. Another topic that comes up often in this context is automation.

Chainlink is in the business of interoperability. 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 were 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 serjanty what happens in the future.

We chatted more at length on the fringes of Consensus 2024 in Austin. 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 cancer etc. Let us call this programmable token transfer. The different dimensions of risk control, validated transfer, reporting and logging are thus build 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