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Sibos Recap With Zach Rynes and Fishy Catfish
Recorded: Oct. 2, 2025 Duration: 0:56:48Space Recording
Short Summary
At Cybos, Chainlink showcased its evolution into a comprehensive blockchain infrastructure provider, announcing key partnerships and innovative projects that enhance its role in both DeFi and traditional finance. With significant growth potential and strategic collaborations, Chainlink is positioned to lead the charge in integrating blockchain technology across various financial sectors.
Full Transcription
I'm Jim, a little mic check.
Fishy, do we have you on the stage?
Yeah, I'm here. How's it going, Jimmy?
Things are good. Excited to do this.
Yeah, likewise.
All right.
Zach, were you able to make it on the stage?
Mic check. I'll give everyone a minute to file in here.
We had a ton of people RSVP for this one, so I'm excited.
Zach, did you make it to the stage?
Little mic check. All right. Yeah. We're a couple of minutes past so we can, uh, start, uh, start. Well,
Hey, thanks everyone for joining. Uh, we had a really fun, uh, time doing this yesterday with,
uh, Michael Robinson talked about, uh, what had been announced at Sybos. It was a lot of fun.
So we're running it back here with with Fishy and Zach.
So excited to be here with you guys.
Why don't we say hello and Zach, let's hope we can get you up on stage and get that mic working.
All right. Well, while Zach's doing that, I'll just, I guess, quick intro myself.
My name's Fishy Catfish.
I'm a longtime 2017, I'm counting Link Marine, been in crypto since 2013.
And yeah, been along for the ride for a long time. And just basically, I got into Chainlink back in 2017 when they were the only ones trying to put data on the blockchain.
And now they've kind of like vastly expanded their purpose and scope from being the only one trying to put data on the blockchain to now being the only complete end-to-end infrastructure platform that spans data connectivity, compliance, privacy, identity.
And then nobody else has this combination of services, which I think gives them a unique advantage.
So once again, they had a unique advantage back in 2017 because nobody else was putting data on chain.
And now they have a unique advantage because nobody else has the kind of cohesive, fully end-to-end one-stop shop platform.
So it's been exciting to see all that growth since then.
Love it. Yeah. I mean, that's what we're here for right so um all right i think we're gonna have zach here in a minute but we can we can just kind of dive in and then once he's up and running we'll
get him uh we'll get him intro'd and get his perspective on things but let's just start fishy uh what's your biggest takeaway from uh
cybo so far biggest takeaway is well there's like a an absolute monsoon of news that have come out
um basically every single day to atari even keep track of all the announcements um that i've come across with so many different institutions, so many different unique workflows,
the introduction and defining of new standards.
My biggest takeaway from all that combined is seeing how not a single one of the announcements that has come out could have been done by any other
protocol in crypto. That's the most magical part about all the announcements is that if you dig
into the guts of any one of these workflows, they're all using a combination of Chainlink
runtime environments, which is like the programming environment that can
kind of build these kind of cross system, cross asset workflows. It's using CCIP. It's using
various types of data feeds, net asset value. It could be using the data streams architecture,
which is like the low latency oracles could be using data feeds. It's adding in compliance, identity, all those, all these other pieces.
So every single one of these things is combining multiple pieces together
that cannot be done by any other loan protocol,
which again is the biggest competitive advantage that Chainlink has.
And so that's, I think the coolest part about this is one,
you see the uniqueness and the scope of the protocol.
And then two, you also see the possibilities of how big this can get.
Because any one of these workflows that were covered here can be adopted by literally hundreds, if not thousands of institutions.
if not thousands of institutions.
And then imagine how many additional
like replications of those workflows
each of those institutions needs
within other counterparties.
And then how many additional iterations
or kind of slight marginal modifications
may need to be made
for some other kind of like slight variation
on the use case.
So one is, so just to kind of recap there,
one is you see the uniqueness and the scope of the protocol itself by being this kind of, you know, end-to-end solution
that nobody else can offer. But secondly, you see just how much potential it has in terms of
adoption, because there's just a limitless number of workflows,
counterparties, and variations of workflows that can be built off of it.
So that's the kind of biggest kind of takeaway that I have
is just kind of like a very eye-opening moment
to see just what the potential of this thing is.
Yeah, a monsoon of news.
That's an amazing characterization.
It feels like that, right?
Internally for me at Chainlink,
it's hard to keep up. There's so much.
Zach, do we get you on the speaker stage? How's your mic working?
Yes. Does this work much better?
Yes. Yes, sir. All right. Hey, welcome. Thanks for hanging out with us.
Yeah. Thanks for having me join us.
All right. Well, we just heard Fishy's takeaway. What's your big takeaway from Cybos, man?
Like, what's your big takeaway from Cybos, man?
I think this is the third year that Chainlink has formerly been at Cybos.
And I think the first year was kind of like a novel experience.
And the second year was building on that.
And I think this year is an accumulation of multiple factors.
A lot of it is what Fishy already touched upon.
But I think it's a realization that Chainlink is not only massively cooking within the DeFi sphere, obviously through
price feeds, but also increasingly through CCIP and these other services across the whole platform.
But in terms of TradFi, my personal take is that most people in crypto still don't understand what
Chainlink is at all. They think it's like a, they think oracles are like a sidecar that are attached
to blockchains and just inject price data. And that's all they do. Whereas Chainlink more and more is becoming this global orchestration layer
where you can create these complex multi-system workflows that coordinate between on-chain
smart contracts and digital assets, as well as off-chain systems like the Swift network
and traditional fiat payment mechanisms. And so you can construct together multiple different services across data,
identity verification, privacy, cross-chain interop,
all these different Oracle services that Chainlink provides
and connect that together with any blockchain
and with any external payment system
or external existing enterprise backend system,
like the Swift network and using Swift messages.
So I think a lot of what Chainlink did at the Cybos
was basically proving that the Chainlink runtime environment,
which is what Chainlink is calling this package solution
where you can run these customized workflows,
is extraordinarily useful for TradFi capital markets.
We've seen it used in DeFi.
Aave just integrated a NavLink data feed solution
that will run on CRE eventually.
But TradFi, CRE is exactly what they needed.
And that's, it allows you to create real world compliant tokenized asset or digital asset
workflows using any blockchain network while reusing the existing SWIFT network and existing
SWIFT messaging standards.
And I think that's something that I think Sergey hit a lot upon within his keynote and other
panel talks that he was there at Sybos, that ultimately when you're adopting blockchains
and tokenized assets, you don't have to throw away your existing systems or existing messaging
standards.
You really just plug in your existing system into something like the Chainlink stack, and
then you can access any and all tokenized assets, digital assets, and blockchain networks. So I think it's kind of, this was a really good validation of what Chainlink
has been building for years and is actually now increasingly moving towards production across a
lot of different use cases. So it's very exciting. Yeah, love it. There's a few threads to pull on.
One just kind of quip is like, you know, BradFi doesn't rip and replace. They just add layers to the onion, right?
And so what Chainlink's offering is like,
hey, like you can keep your existing infrastructure,
but this is your gateway, right?
To doing things on chain,
which I think is just, you know,
that's the winning motion, I think.
Second is, curious,
I think this jives with what you're saying,
but you had mentioned right this
is the third year of formally being there it's like the progression over those years it went
from like hey this is a kind of long for the ride to like oh we're right next to the biggest people
at cybos like we have everyone's attention it's really amazing to see that's gone from, hey, there's this blockchain
thing to like, oh, this is the future and we're all leaning in. Curious if that's also what you're
seeing as well. I mean, if you really want to go far back, you know, Sergey was at Cybos in 2016.
I think it was John from Swift who said, yeah, I saw Sergey walking alone in the halls of Cybos. So it went from Sergey joining a hackathon
and working with Swift in an initial sense in 2016,
which is really just kind of a POC exploratory thing,
to now, yeah, Chainlink is working formally with Swift
over the past almost 10 years on these solutions.
There's a big, nice booth,
and then we have all these partner presentations of here.
We're building something with UBS.
We're building something with Gleef. We're building something with Swift themselves and DTCC
and it's like it's come full circle and I think it goes to show how visionary Sergey's perspective
was and what the industry was going to be. If you look at the original presentation back in 2016,
it basically describes a tokenized asset connected to external oracles for data connected to the swift network
for traditional payment settlements using iso standard messaging which is exactly what's being
built right now so like that's a pretty pretty visionary uh perspective to know immediately what
swift needs and then now we're at that stage where it's actually being built out uh for production
use cases yeah that's pretty cool um i also cool. I also want to add to that point
about Zach's trip down memory lane
of how we come full circle there too
because
Sergey actually, back
when it was smart contracts as an
organization where it was like a centralized Oracle
as a service company, they actually
entered the Swift hackathon under
InnoTribe is what it was called
back in 2016. And so they won the InnoTribe is what it was called back in 2016.
And so they won the InnoTribe hackathon in 2016
for a POC they did for making the coupon payments
for quarterly bond payments using the Swift network.
And so they won that.
And then today it was just announced
that Chainlink once again entered as an organization
and won the hackathon now again
against a bunch of major banks.
So I think it's kind of funny
that they were winning hackathons
back in 2016
when they were smart contract
and now they're,
nine years later,
back at Swift
and winning the hackathons once again.
Yeah, it's like a beautiful
cosmic cemetery here.
Yeah.
All right.
So this is actually a perfect segue.
Thank you for teeing that up, Mike.
So Zach, while we got you, give us a rundown of what's been announced. Just like quick hit.
What are the news? Like, what's the news? And then fishy from there. I'd love to have you contextualize it.
Yeah, I mean, it's a lot. So I think it's useful to break it down by day, just progressively.
break it down by day, just progressively.
The first day, Monday, Chainlink announced the phase two of the Calm industry initiative.
Calm is the Corporate Actions Lifecycle Management Initiative.
We saw Chainlink orchestrate and lead an industry initiative with 24 other institutions, including
SWIFT, DTCC, Euroclear, DBS, UBS, BNP, ANZ, a whole bunch of
other asset managers, banks, and financial market infrastructures. This was building upon a
development that happened last year, now with more industry participants, focusing on solving the
corporate actions data problem, and specifically showing how the Chain link platform blockchains and AI all combined
can be used to turn unstructured corporate actions data. So for example, a press release of a company
saying they're going to do a stock split and converting that human readable text into machine
readable text that is structured in traditional ISO expected formatting and validated by entities
like the DTCC for consumption by tokenized
equities as well as traditional systems. So corporate actions data processing is a very
complicated and convoluted process in the traditional system. I think it's like 75%
of corporate actions are still processed manually, which is a huge pain in the ass for the traditional
system. And as we're going to move more and more towards tokenized equities,'re going to need corporate actions data on chain so if the company is going to do a
dividend or a stock split or there's going to be a merger or acquisition that data needs to be
accessible on chain and validated on chain and if companies are putting out corporate actions as a
press release or a pdf you need a system with a system like this to convert this data into a
machine readable format and feed it back into
the traditional system. So what was built upon this year compared to last year was beyond the
fact that there's more industry participants, twice as much actually compared to last year,
but that they introduced a few new data attester and data contributor roles, which is effectively
where different entities can come in and verify and
enrich the records. So AI, it's great, but it's not necessarily perfect. So you have basically a
second level review, making sure that the corporate actions data is accurate without having the whole
process being manual, which is why it takes forever today, as well as incorporating a Swift
adapter so that when the corporate actions data is processed and validated, it can be sent back into the existing system using the Swift network and ISO 20022 standard,
as well as publishing the corporate actions data on DTCC's AppChain blockchain for their
financial market infrastructure ecosystem and distribution out to other blockchain networks.
So this was a pretty cool initiative because it also leveraged the Chainlink runtime environment for orchestrating these complex workflows, as well as services like CCIP for
distributing the data across different networks. So a use case like this is maybe not the most
sexy use case of all of blockchain and crypto, but it's one of those use cases that you can apply
Oracle's blockchains and AI to a multi-billion dollar problem and save institutions
hundreds of millions and unlock the ability to tokenize a whole new asset class on chain.
I think it's a very very massive development so that was kind of the big story on day one I would
say. Day two there was a couple of different things but they're all connected apart of the
same story I would say. Chainlink introduced its new technical solution that allows institutions
to interact with blockchains and digital assets using their existing SWIFT infrastructure and ISO
2022 messaging standards, which is the standard messaging language of the financial system.
That effectively allows institutions to, for example, engage in subscription and redemptions of a tokenized fund.
And coincidentally, the first use case of this new technical solution was with UBS, who just adopted a product called the Digital Transfer Agent Technical Standard, which is a different Chainlink product that Chainlink announced that day, which effectively allows existing fund administrators and transfer agents
to bring their traditional operations on chain so they could support tokenized assets.
So the first user of this was UBS Asset Management. They have a tokenized fund called
U-Mint that they have tokenized on Ethereum. That tokenized fund is now plugged into the
digital transfer agent, which then allows a fund distributor to eventually plug in and do
subscription and redemptions. And those subscription and redemptions will be facilitated using the
existing Swift infrastructure messaging standards that the financial system already uses.
So this is kind of an example of Chainlink introducing multiple different pieces,
custom built for the financial ecosystem in order to support tokenized assets. On the one end,
it's the ability for institutions to use their existing
messaging standards to interact with tokenized assets.
And on the other end, it's for asset managers and asset issuers
to even issue the assets in the first place through a digital transfer agent
capability, which unlocks subscription redemptions and all these other cool
features.
So U-Mint is on Ethereum mainnet.
Eventually more fund distributors will be onboarded so that people can begin investing in it in the same way that they do with BlackRock Buildle and the other tokenized funds that we see on chain. But it's a pretty cool example of how the Chainlink tech stack is being used for multiple different services. And this is like nav data feeds, CCIP, CRE, the automated compliance engine. like it's kind of like the full stack being used
to manage what is becoming an in-production tokenized fund.
I'm sure, Fishy, if you want to add anything else
on this one since it's been convoluted.
Yeah, no, you nailed all the points, but yeah,
I wanted to just once again stress how
there is no other protocol that has the combination
of CCIP, the compliance engine,
the data part with the nav feeds, and then be able to basically
distribute this all over the place. And so I always kind of make this point in that
Chealink's data competitors have no interop. Chealink's interop competitors have no data.
And so if you want to replicate what Chealink is doing here, you as an institution have to basically
choose an interop provider or
choose a data provider. Like you first have to decide which piece do I start with? Do I start
with interop and then go look for data and then go look for other pieces? Or do I start with data
first and then go look for interop and all my other pieces? So basically as an institution,
you have to make this kind of decision of, okay, if I choose any Chainlink competitor,
I know right off the bat, I'm not getting a
complete end-to-end solution.
I then have to kind of go back to this kind of like, you know, flea market and basically
then go and look for all the other pieces to kind of cobble them together to replicate
what Shilink offers on its own.
And of course, it's not going to be this kind of like elegant solution all through kind
of like one protocol and UI and additional trust assumptions and, you know, varying levels of code quality, node operator quality, et cetera, et cetera.
Or my alternative is just using Chainlink and getting all this solved for me in one place.
And so like, I'm, I'm sure that institutions are used to getting these kind of complete
platform solutions that handle end-to-end cycles that
meet and fulfill all of their criteria, not trying to piecemeal, stitch together a bunch
of competing protocols to replicate what Chainlink offers on its own.
So once again, this is just a huge testament to the biggest competitive advantage Chainlink
offers is that nobody else can do what Chainlink does.
And just to add on to that, like a big focus of what Chainlink and Swift have been building towards
for many, many years at this point is enabling institutions to interact with blockchains and
digital assets and tokenized assets using their existing infrastructure and using their existing
messaging standards. So it becomes plug and play to plug into the Chainlink tech stack into the
first place. And if you're going to plug into blockchains through Chainlink, you already have
native access to nav data, to identity data, to cross-chain interop, to orchestration workflows,
to all these different components within the stack. So you can easily just plug and play different
components together. And one part of the stack that I don't see any other protocol on the market
even attempting to offer is the ability to do workflow orchestration. It's the ability to write
off-chain code that orchestrates a complex series of interactions between existing business
workflows, on-chain interactions with smart contracts, off-chain interactions with, for
example, the Swift network or the DTCC network, and the ability to plug into all these other Oracle services
for cross-chain interop, data interoperability, compliance, identity verification, etc.
It's the stitching together of all those different services, in addition to the fact that Chain
Like Even has those services in the first place.
That's, I think, exceptionally valuable and very valuable for the institutions who, you
know, they need those services.
If you listen to the institutions on what they need to adopt tokenized assets, it's almost always
the same points of privacy, identity, compliance, scalability, all of which that Chainlink offers
and then more, I would say. Yeah. And also just to kind of add on to that other part too is
something that I caught notice of in the past couple of weeks that I thought was very interesting as well too is Swift's chief innovation officer, Tom, who did the one-on-one with Sergey a few days before Sybos, who's also attending SmartCon as a speaker himself.
on LinkedIn recently talking about blockchains, DeFi, how Swift thinks about DeFi, how Swift
thinks about blockchains, how they think about credible neutrality, governance, et cetera.
And one of the things that he was kind of pointing out that speaks exactly to what Zach
was just saying about the kind of orchestration is that he was making this kind of, I can
read some of his quotes on LinkedIn, but he was making a point about like
what the needs are for institutions. And he was talking about like having this kind of like air
traffic control layer of how different systems can kind of interoperate and kind of work with
one another. And then he was getting a couple of replies from people who were kind of like
speculating or answering his question as to like, which protocol kind of best address or fulfilled the properties that he
was talking about. And so one guy basically mentioned Ethereum and its L2s and what Tom
from Swift said to him, he said that you make a great point. He says Ethereum's rollup roadmap
really does act like air traffic control within its own airspace and the focus on public goods it's what's made it so resilient
but finance doesn't only fly in ethereum skies there's solana and soon tempo yes but also non
defy settlement venues like fedwire cls dtcc sepa picks and sips each has its own hubs with its own
rules so even if ethereum runs air traffic control for its
ecosystem of L2s, global coordination needs an air traffic control that spans all of these air
spaces. That's the real unlock for institutions. Then another guy mentioned like, oh, you know,
Solana is the place to kind of, you know, where Swift can kind of fulfill its needs. And then he
tells him the same thing. He says, Ethereum sets the rule book and runs the runway. L2s add terminals, but clearance still happens at the hub. The issue isn't 7TPS. The
guy was, the Solana guy was fighting Ethereum, calling it 7TPS. He says, it's cross hub coordination
of Solana, Tempo, Fedwire. That's where air traffic control comes in. And the final guy
basically was pitching, you know, Avalanche with its like, you know, EVM subnets. And then, you know, Tom said to him, Avalanche subnets are
powerful, no question. And they let Avalanche run multiple hubs under one umbrella, but the
financial world does not live under a single chain's umbrella. Banks clear on Fedwire, they
settle securities on DTCC, they process payroll through SEPA
or PIX, and increasingly use Ethereum altues.
That's why the real air traffic control has to sit above any one chain.
Subnets solve intra-avalanche coordination, cross-venue orchestration is a different class
of problem, and that's the gap institutions still need filled.
That's exactly what Chainlink runtime environment is built to solve.
Amazing.
We just went so deep.
I don't even think we made it through day two announcements.
I mean, what else happened, Zach? I know we just talked about winning the hackathon. What else was on your radar?
Yeah, so just to recap, day one, that was corporate actions phase two with some of the biggest institutions in the world.
Day after was Swift connectivity solution by Chainlink, which uses the Chainlink runtime environment to enable banks and institutions to connect to blockchains using their existing SWIFT infrastructure. Then additionally on day two,
we saw the digital transfer agent technical standard, which UBS is using to tokenize a
money market fund on Ethereum, which also plugs into that SWIFT connectivity solution for
automated subscription redemptions in both fiat and digital assets. So those were just the first two days.
Then on day three, there was a couple of things.
One was a partnership with Gleaf and Chainlink.
Gleaf is the regulatory mandated verifiable identity provider or G20 mandated identity verification solution.
They have a solution called the Legal Identifier, the LEI,
and they also have a verifiable version called the VLEI.
And Chainlink integrated that existing identity solution
that many, many institutions in the world
uses their standardized identity verification tool
within Chainlink's compliance solution stack,
the cross-chain identity standard,
as well as the automated compliance engine. And that basically enables financial institutions who want to engage with
tokenized assets, issue tokenized assets, trade tokenized assets, or digital assets,
to be able to reuse their existing identity standards within the context of digital asset
transactions. You can probably sense that there's a common theme here of a lot of what Chainlink is
doing is taking things that institutions already use and depend upon and porting them into the Web3 context so that that infrastructure can be reused within the context of blockchain transactions, which they want to do. was Chainlink announcing a new data publishing solution called Datalink with Europe's, or one
of Europe's largest stock exchange operators, Deutsche Boris, and I think about three or four
of their sub venues that trade within the European market. Deutsche Boris is basically making their
market data available on chain across 40 different public and private blockchains through Chainlink infrastructure.
And this is exchange market data that many financial institutions already use and depend upon and will become
very important in the context of tokenized assets when you tokenize European stocks on chain.
And this is like yet another example of Chainlink is taking existing data, existing infrastructure that institutions
already need and already use within the traditional system,
and making it compatible within a blockchain context,
so that when more and more assets get converted into a blockchain format or a tokenized asset format,
they already have access to the same exact identity solutions, corporate actions, data solutions,
Swift network connectivity, as well as market data through Datalink.
Chainlink is basically taking all the stuff that institutions already need and have
in the traditional system and bringing it over to the Web3 DeFi on chain crypto context
so they can keep operating as expected.
So that was day three, porting more existing financial infrastructure into a blockchain
context.
And then just today, something that Fishischi mentioned, that Chainlink participated
in and won a hackathon, Swift's 2025 hackathon. And if you think hackathon, you might think like,
oh, a bunch of like scrappy startup teams trying to build something at like ECC, like not shitting
on ECC or anything, but like this type of hackathon at Swift is essentially like 140 financial
institutions taking place in the hackathon,
showing how different Swift infrastructure can be used
to create new and innovative solutions
and building upon Swift.
So Chainlink won one of the awards at the Swift hackathon
by combining the Chainlink compliance standard,
the automated compliance engine,
with the Gleaf identity framework, the VLE engine, with the GLEAF identity
framework, the VLEI, combining that with Swift messaging, ISO 20022, to enable compliant
digital asset and tokenized asset trading and settlements across chains and across borders
through CCIP. So basically reusing existing identity standards, reusing existing Swift
messaging standards, and combining that
with Chainlink's identity and compliance standard, as well as the cross-chain standard through CCIP,
and packaging that together into one solution for the cross-chain settlement of tokenized assets.
So this is something that Chainlink has showcased before, and now Chainlink is showing it in the
context of a Swift hackathon and is beating out a whole bunch of other banks who tried to innovate, which I think is, is a pretty cool concept that
chain link was able to come in nine years ago in 2016, when hackathon by showing how cool smart
contracts are, and then coming in nine years later and showing how cool smart contracts are. And
chain link is again, in the context of facilitating institutional adoption of digital assets, using
Swift standards and Chainlink
standards combined together. I think it's pretty entertaining. Pretty cool.
And they even had one more service. I think, I'm not sure if you, did you mention a group of
reserves? Because they also use that too. I didn't, but yeah, they use like the whole stack
on enabling these assets to move cross-chain. And it's really cool that all of these workflows
across all these announcements being made, a lot of them are in the context of one specific use case.
For example, the digital transfer agency being used by UBS, that was in the context of a tokenized money market fund that they issued on Ethereum.
But this isn't limited to Ethereum, and it's not limited to tokenized money market funds.
You can do the same workflow for tokenized ETFs or tokenized equity or tokenized bonds or tokenized whatever,
you still need the same exact infrastructure. Like the context of moving assets cross-chain
with identity verification in the Swift hackathon, you can use that for stablecoins, you can use that
for CBDCs, tokenized equities, tokenized ETF bonds, like any asset, it doesn't really matter.
Chainlink's just providing the infrastructure and showing specific use case examples of
how it could and can be used. And something like UBS is something that's moving
more quickly towards production adoption, but these are really just standards that are combining
Swift's existing standards and the standards that Chainlink has been building for the past
10 years or so together with Swift. So it's very cool developments. A shit ton of things happened at the LDR.
Yeah.
I think I always will reflect on one of the coolest things,
yet biggest challenges of describing Chainlink is Oracle's, we have a bunch of standards,
and they're pretty much infinitely extensible into any product.
You have these core primitives that, you know,
provide this piece of the infrastructure stack and you can put them into like
any permutation to solve whatever problem it is,
which is like creates this massive opportunity,
but also is like makes it inherently challenging to just like try and explain
it to your grandma. Right. So, um, it um it's one it's like it's a really
interesting piece about like being in this space and specifically with chain link but i'm curious
just all right so we just went super deep on all the announcements um you know fishy i was gonna
ask you just say hey why does this matter but i'm thinking maybe maybe you can kind of we can couch
this in the idea of like let's zoom out a little bit.
Maybe like, why does this matter?
How is this manifesting in the Chainlink platform's evolution?
And then Zach, I'm thinking you're probably going to have something to opine on after that.
Then we'll kind of round it out with some forward-looking stuff.
So Fishy, yeah, why does this matter?
And like, put it into of the the platform's evolution well why it matters is um chaelinx is
basically starting sort of from the ground up with a consensus protocol called ocr3 at the bottom that allows its nodes to basically come to consensus around any type of
task, data, interop, whatever it is. Then Chainlink is basically defining sets of standards
across data, connectivity, compliance, privacy. And then on top of that, they're building actual
services that are powered by the consensus, defined by the standards.
And now they're getting the largest institutions in the world to basically adopt those standards, right?
And so what's powerful about this is that it basically creates this kind of like a forcing function where if you can define these standards, power these standards, and get the largest institution in the world to adopt and use these standards, then it kind of creates the ultimate network effect because now all the counterparties that these institutions do business with are going to say, hey, if you want to interact with us on chain, and it seems like finance is moving more and more on chain, this is how you do business with us you use the chilling standard and so i think
that's the ultimate ability to kind of build a very very large network effect where your protocol
is powering stuff on chain it's powering hybrid workflows they're combining off-chain systems
and on-chain systems and these are all chain agnostic, virtual machine agnostic workflows.
So you're building network effects that are larger than any chain,
larger than any virtual machine, larger than just being on-chain,
larger than just being off-chain because it's kind of spanning
all of these different systems.
And the powerful part of it is that you're basically changing the entire sequence of
how on-chain finance or even just Web3 development in general is even kind of happening because
the current status quo as a developer, I'm not a developer, I'm speaking just from the
perspective of a developer, right now it's defined by chain choice, right? So you show up to build
an application, you say, ha ha, I want to build on this right? So you show up to build an application.
You say, ha ha, I want to build on this chain.
So you choose a virtual machine.
You choose a chain.
You basically build all the on-chain code for your application.
And at the very end of that process, you then decide, okay, I've chosen my chain.
I've built my application.
Let me now decide who is going to be my bridge provider, who's going to be my Oracle provider, and that you kind of like staple on at
the end, your infrastructure at the tail end of that process. But everything is kind of basically
anchored to the initial choice of chain selection. Well, with this kind of chain runtime environment,
the entire process is completely inverting.
So rather than choosing your infrastructure at the end,
you basically start with the selection
of the chain link platform being first.
You then basically build out all of these chain agnostic,
virtual machine agnostic, on-chain plus off-chain
legacy financial infrastructure and network
systems and you basically build all of these workflows inside the chain link runtime environment
and then once you build all these workflows inside the environment you then decide okay
which chains do i want these workflows to be deployed onto?
And then at the end of that,
you then add the on-chain app code at the end of that process.
So that's, I think, the kind of craziest kind of inversion of how just app development period happens in crypto
is that it's completely inverting the process
from being chain first,
infrastructure last, to now being this kind of non-chain infrastructure first, where you basically
are building on the chain platform first, and then you're basically choosing which chains you want
to be deploying on. And what's crazy about this is that once you build these workflows once,
is that once you build these workflows once,
they're now deployable across many, many, many chains, right?
And so if you are now deploying within a virtual machine,
so let's say you're like, okay, I'm building within the EVM,
your marginal cost of now moving your application
onto many other EVM chains basically goes to basically near zero.
And if you're going across VMs, mean that, okay, I want to deploy on, you know, like
these 10 EVM chains, but I also want to be on Solana, even though you still have the
additional cost of having to modify your on-chain code from being, you know, from EVM to SVM, you know, from, you know, Solidity to Rust or whatever,
it's still a massively reduced marginal cost because all the workflows that you build on
the chaining platform do not have to be modified whatsoever. So this basically makes it extremely
easy for developers, whether they're on the d5 side of things or the
trap by side of things to get mass distribution um on their workflows and the other key part i
also want to point out too is actually rewinding the clock back to i want to say smart con 2022
i'm not sure if it's 2022 or 2023 when a jonathan aerenfeld who's like the the strategy director at swift was at um smart
con and he said that you know swift doesn't want to be the business of you know i'm paraphrasing
here roughly but he was saying something like you know swift doesn't want to be betting on block
chains because if we bet on these 10 chains this year and those chains disappear you know we don't
want to lose money and the banks are in the same business. And he said, that's why we're betting on Chainlink.
So in other words, he regards the platform risk of Chainlink as the kind of default starting
point anchoring platform being stronger and more future-proofed than any one chain ecosystem,
right?
So in other words, he thinks that Chainlink is basically the most sure thing to kind of start your application building process and what they want to serve as the kind of anchoring gateway of how institutions build these kind of on-chain finance workflows across the entire space. So basically the biggest takeaways here are CRE is inverting the
application development process from being sort of chain centric to being kind of chain,
I don't know what the right word is, but basically it's not as chain focused because
you no longer have to even think about
which chain is the best chain to deploy on because you can basically get onto all of them,
right? So you don't even have to be burdened with the task of, okay, do I deploy on this chain or
that chain? Which chain is the best? If it's basically pretty trivial to get your application
or assets distributed across many, many chains with much less friction,
cost, and time than before. And if you're getting institutions to also adopt these standards and
also build their workflows like this, it's kind of further kind of cementing the network effect of
this is how institutions, their counterparties, and users basically interact with me on chain.
So I think that's the kind of pretty powerful, not so obvious kind of takeaways from this
is that the institutional adoption acts as a forcing function that makes other users also
adopt those standards.
But I also think CRE in itself is a complete paradigm shift in how all crypto app development happens from being chain first to kind of chain last.
And that Siri makes it easier for developers to get their applications onto many chains with much less time and capital costs than before that.
And so that will make them basically, I'll start building with Chainlink first.
I'll build all my Chainlink workflows because I know these things are deployed across all the chains
because the workflows I build are chain agnostic,
they're virtual machine agnostic.
So I know that they're kind of superfluous
across all the chains I want to be on.
And at the end of that process, I'll figure out,
okay, these are the top 15, 20, 30 chains.
I want my stuff to be live on.
Let me then go add the on-chain application code
at the end of that process.
So those are the biggest takeaways I kind of see from all this love it i just want to add
on that point uh just to kind of tie into like some industry megatrends that are happening at
the same time we are seeing and this is something that chain link has predicted a long time ago an
absolute like cambrian explosion of blockchain so we see various different L1s launching into
production, various different L2s, EVM chains, SVM chains, public chains, private chains, bank
chains, like there's particularly with stable coins, there's a whole host of new blockchains
that are launching both in the TradFi context and in the DeFi context. And I think there's
two major implications that are happening for Chainlink, both within the chain context as well as the institutional context.
In the chain context, what we've historically seen is that in order for any blockchain to be successful, they need Chainlink services.
And this is basically the platform pitch from a blockchain perspective, why they would want to join scale and pay for Chainlink integration.
and why they would want to join scale and pay for Chainlink integration
is that if you want to actually be a successful blockchain,
whether you're a TradFi blockchain or you're a hybrid blockchain,
like kind of like what Canton is, or you're just a purely DeFi public chain,
you're going to need data oracles in order to have a DeFi ecosystem.
You need cross-chain oracles so that people can bridge capital
in and out of your ecosystem.
If you want tokenized assets, you need compliance oracles and privacy oracles,
as well as legacy system oracles.
You need these full platform of services
if you want your blockchain ecosystem to actually grow.
If you want to get an Aave deployment,
you're going to need a Chainlink platform deployment.
If you want UBS to tokenize their fund and transfer it to your chain,
you need to have Chainlink services.
So from a blockchain perspective,
Chainlink is this accelerant of growth for their ecosystem so they can actually provide the tooling that the devs on that chain need to tokenize assets or build applications or deploy a lending market or whatever else that they realistically want to do that needs oracles in order to operate.
And from an institutional perspective, the proliferation of the number of blockchains is all the more justification
for why you need a global orchestration layer.
Like what Fischi mentioned, the reason Swift is, quote unquote, betting on Chainlink is
because they know that Chainlink can solve the blockchain integration problem.
They are able to provide their banks, who own Swift, a single plug-in solution.
So they plug into the Chainlink platform one time using the Swift infrastructure and Swift messaging standards, and now they can access any and all blockchain networks. And they
don't need chain-specific integration code. They don't need to find out if the latest blockchain
being created is a complete scam or it's something that's going to have substance. They can outsource
that problem completely to Chainlink, and Chainlink will not only provide the connectivity to
institutions through Swift connectivity, but also provide the services that make those blockchains useful in the context of an institutional
transaction. So Chainlink is really serving like two sides of the different marketplace. They're
making blockchains useful in the first place, both in the DeFi and the TradFi context, as well as
making it accessible by institutions who need to access those chains, whether for their own reasons,
their own business reasons, or their clients want to be able to access those blockchain networks
and tokenized assets on those networks. So Chainlink's able to facilitate this marketplace
on two sides. So everything that was kind of announced at Cybos was really focused on the
institutional orchestration side where, you know, if we're moving towards a world where there's
going to be thousands of different blockchain networks, and it seems probable that at least on the long tail, there's
going to be a lot of different chains, and they're all going to need interoperability and
orchestration across them, then Chainlink is perfectly suited given that it's already compatible
with existing Swift standards and already provides the Oracle service technical solutions required
for tokenizing and interacting and settling
tokenized assets at a meaningful scale.
So Chainlink is really serving two sides of the marketplace, which I think is very powerful
and kind of gets into why the platform pitch makes sense.
Because if Chainlink was literally just a price Oracle, okay, we would power Aave and
a couple of DeFi applications, but you wouldn't have any pitch for institutions. And the pitch to chains as to why you need Chainlink would be much weaker
versus, hey, we have this complete platform of services that solves the data compliance, privacy,
interop, legacy system connectivity orchestration problems. So your chain is useful. And we're also
combining your chain with everyone else's chain so that institutions can access it through one unified interface through the Chainlink platform.
That's a very, very strong pitch.
And I think that's probably Chainlink's biggest competitive advantage because no one else is even attempting to achieve this level of scale.
Yeah.
And when I think about it, when I try to distill it, when I explain it to folks, it sort of comes down to this idea of the gateway.
Chainlink is the gateway for institutions
to get on chain, right?
And when you control the access point
or the distribution point,
you also control everything downstream of it,
which I think is a really, really powerful thing.
Well said, guys.
So let's round this out,
maybe something a little bit more fun
or a little bit more lighthearted here.
What's exciting you in the very near term?
And then maybe, I'm going to throw a curveball at you, maybe a recommendation of a good source of information to follow or some recommendation for the people in the audience to up their knowledge.
So maybe Fishy, we can start with you.
Just like what's near term
super exciting to you and like maybe a recommendation for the people in the audience
here. Then Zach, we'll go over to you and close it out. Well, I'll answer the second question
first. My recommendation for news to follow is following my Twitter account at catfishfishy.
What is my handle? I don't even know what it is. What is it? Yeah, at catfishfishy. That's a good
source of news to follow for all chilling stuff i'm also actually the number one pith influencer and also very
highly ranked xrp influencer too actually so uh if you want uh all your latest news on pith xrp and
chain link my account's the place to be um the uh and then what the first question was like what
else to be excited about yeah just like near-term excitement maybe something that's like a little
under the radar that well i mean like, a little under the radar.
Well, I mean, what's sort of under the radar is, like, following the whole news about Swift's own chain. Because they were – not a whole lot of information came out about that.
There was, like, mixed rumors circulating.
And then what Sergey presented at Sybos from the footage that Chris Barrett had posted in the screenshots was kind of a little bit more in depth than maybe what's currently publicly acknowledged or understood.
Like when Sergey was on stage talking about Swift's, like, you know, when he was presenting his keynote, he was, you know, going to some more details about providing data oracles, compliance oracles, connectivity oracles, identity oracles, blah, blah, blah to Swift's chain.
And so that's not something that was well understood or kind of acknowledged or processed from Swift's own blog and announcements.
community was actually like maybe even confused or kind of even somehow like let down from that
being the kind of day one announcement because they kind of felt that like chilling got snubbed
or something even though like that's not like they're like oh yeah chain's been working for
like 10 years with swift and uh the culmination of all those efforts were this like a blog where
like they're not even name by name and so i think some people were kind of like confused by that so
i think that's one thing to kind of be excited about as like more details kind of
bubble up to the surface around that and like what all kind of comes from that and then also other
kind of announcements that are like people were confused by that because they thought that that
should have been a chilling announcement but like that's not a chilling announcement the big news
there is that swift now has their own chain that that's the news. It's a Swift announcement about themselves,
not a Swift announcement about somebody else.
And so Swift doesn't always have to mention Chainlink
anytime they do something blockchain related.
They're simply just announcing they have their own chain,
but they still kind of showed enough love
and care enough about their relationship with Chainlink
that even though they weren't like name by name
they did still kind of acknowledge and show love to chain link by including that sentence about
continuing and expanding upon their previous work on interoperability which is clearly a reference
to chain link but again that was not a chain link announcement that was a swift announcement
about themselves and about their own chain i'm sure there's like more stuff that will come as
a result of that based on the fact that like sergey was talking about being involved in
their chain and other things so like that's the thing to be excited about
zach how about you
i'm super interested in seeing more and more of the CRE workflows start to scale up.
CRE itself becoming more and more production ready and more capable, as well as the enterprise
workflows that you can build via CRE.
Because we're essentially going from a world where a lot of institutions and enterprise
want bespoke custom solutions.
And that could be difficult to do when you have a collection of rigid products.
CRE breaks down the rigidity and makes the platform fully customizable.
So you can build fully custom Oracle solutions in a couple of days
what would have taken months in working with Chainlink Labs on.
Even within the DeFi context, LamaRisk is building a nav data feed
for pricing tokenized assets on the Aave Horizon market.
And right now it's using like a modified nav link data feed,
but they're moving towards the CRE stack.
And that way they can incorporate whatever data sources they want
and whatever risk controls and checks that they want to implement.
And it's fully, you know, they run the Oracle solution.
It's on the Chainlink stack.
It runs on the CRE, but they're the ones managing and configuring it.
So, and I think that's kind of what a lot of people had as like the original vision for Chainlink is everyone like kind of spins up their own Oracle network and has their
own configurability. In this sense, the Chainlink network and the Dons are running all the
infrastructure, but you can configure the Oracle network however you want. And that's very powerful
in the DeFi context. But I think in the institutional TradFi context, when institutions can come in and
self-serve and permissionlessly build their own solutions on top of the Chainlink stack
and also replicate and reuse existing workflow stacks. For example, the Ondo JP Morgan use case
where CRE was used to facilitate cross-chain settlement of tokenized assets between the
Connexus permission chain environment
and the Ondo public chain environment,
that whole workflow can be replicated
across an infinite number of combinations of chains and assets.
You can just take that Siri workflow,
exchange out the chain ID,
change out the tokenized asset identifier,
and boom, you have a whole new workflow
and you didn't even have to do anything.
You just switched a couple variables and now you have a whole new use case.
I think that's incredibly powerful as a platform capability.
So I'm really excited to seeing that scale up.
I think that should accelerate these institutional workflows and use cases much more.
Industry-wide, I think DeFi is moving more and more towards becoming FinTech industry.
Like through all these neobanks, I've seen a whole bunch of DeFi is moving more and more towards becoming fintech industry, like through all these neobanks.
I've seen a whole bunch of DeFi apps and wallet providers basically become neobanks.
They have their own debit cards.
They have their own stable coins.
They have integrated spot and perps trading, still non-custodial.
I think that's great for Chainlink because all of DeFi basically runs on Chainlink.
So if you have a mobile app that's running at PayPal or Venmo level
scale, and people are able to deposit their capital into that app, it gets converted to a
stablecoin, gets deposited on Aave, you have perps trading, and you have lending, and you have all
these use cases, well, that's going to be powered by Chainlink anyway. So things that scale DeFi is
good for Chainlink infrastructure and just good for crypto in general. And in general, in TradFi,
I think we're going to see a whole lot more uh trad fi stable coins because the genius bill as well as more trad fi chains like stripes tempo
chain i think we're going to see a lot more of those and like i explained before more blockchains
is strictly good chain link both from a scale deal perspective and also a we can package everything
together and reduce complexity for you pitch for the institutional side. There's more chains and more stable coins.
It means more chain link services for price feeds and proof reserves and CCIP.
So the whole growth of the industry is just going to accelerate massively,
and it's going to be across both DeFi and TradFi,
and they're going to inevitably converge into just being called finance.
But when the DeFi industry and the TradFi industry are both
running on Chainlink standards and Chainlink tech stacks, when the legal barriers and the
business interests align where the two industries can just really just merge into being one,
they're both running on the Chainlink standard anyway. So that makes the interoperability and
the connectivity infinitely more seamless. So I'm looking forward to a whole lot of things
in the industry and all of it's good for Chainlink. I love it. Yeah. Right. More scale, more complexity
is better for Chainlink. Um, okay. This was incredible. Uh, so much knowledge was just
shared. Appreciate, uh, both of you guys. So, uh, fishy and Zach, thanks for, uh, thanks for
hanging out with us. Thanks for sharing a ton of knowledge
um this is this is really fun yeah thanks for having having us up and one thing if you want
to learn more about chain link i would say the definitive resource if you have time and like your
brain hasn't been cooked by social media which i know mine kind of has so i don't i don't judge you
if you don't read blogs but if you do read blogs, I would recommend checking out a recent blog post on the Chainlink blog
called The Endgame. It's about the Chainlink platform. It's a decent
read, but if you want to understand what the Chainlink platform is and what each of the
different components are, how they interconnect, what the context is, the history,
I would recommend reading that blog because that'll be the most up-to-date and the most
densely-filled, jam-pack that blog because that'll be the most up-to-date and the most like
Densely filled jam-packed blog post that you can read and to learn about the channel platform. So take a take a read It's it's it's it's worth your time
Well that and fishy thank you for coming on as well appreciate you oh well, thank you
you oh well thank you yeah you know thank you for having me it's always a blast to chat with you
Yeah, you know, thank you for having me. It's always a blast to chat with you guys and kind of
guys and kind of uh give you my perspective on things but yeah it's been uh awesome seeing all
the news coming out of uh um cybos and i you know i would always expect that the uh high
high caliber chilling marketing team would know not to blow all their biggest announcements
at cybos and not save
something for the, not pace themselves for SmartCon.
So I'm always hoping that we got some other big stuff loaded in the chamber for
SmartCon.
Love it.
What a teaser.
All right.
Well, thanks both of you guys.
Hey, everyone in the audience.
Appreciate you spending your time with us and we'll catch you next time.
So we'll wrap it here for today and we'll catch you next time so we'll wrap it here for today and and we'll catch you all later
