Sergey Nazarov Envisions Chainlink-Powered Golden Record At Token2049

During a panel discussion with RockawayX’s Viktor Fischer, Ondo Finance’s Justin Schmidt, and PV01’s Max Boonen at Token2049 in Dubai, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov elaborated on how Chainlink-powered tokenized real-world assets can serve as a golden record in an onchain financial system that runs on a global internet of contracts.

Chainlink’s comprehensive oracle infrastructure allows the entire life cycle of tokenized assets, ranging from real estate to precious metals and carbon credits, to be transparently managed onchain. Because tokenized assets confer new opportunities such as fractionalization and programmability while reducing counterparty risk, the space is projected to reach $10 trillion by 2030.

“There’s a whole bunch of assets at the edge of the financial system that can’t be purchased, can’t be owned, can’t be fractionally divided,” Nazarov said.

Beyond realizing benefits like fractionalization and atomic settlement, Nazarov is most focused on turning tokenized assets into what he envisions as a unified golden record. “The real-world asset is an ownership receipt, but in addition to being an ownership receipt, it’s in a data container that has all kinds of information about the underlying asset,” he explained. 

In Nazarov’s view, such a unified golden record model offers a superior alternative to the traditional model of asset ownership, in which value and data are transferred through different systems that generate various market information asymmetries. 

In the unified golden record model, tokenized assets would not only be packaged with all of the relevant data; that data would also be updated in near-real time to reflect the status of the underlying asset through vital Chainlink services such as Proof of Reserve (PoR).

“There’s all this data about the underlying asset that is really critical to understanding it, buying it, selling it, managing the risk of it,” Nazarov explained. “What I’m excited about now is packaging all that into the asset itself onchain, so that you need absolutely no expertise about the asset; you just need to look at the onchain record.”

Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) unlocks the ultimate potential of tokenized assets by allowing them to flow freely throughout the expanding multi-chain universe.  Because CCIP can also send data and messages cross-chain, tokenized assets can be programmatically transferred with instructions for how they should be handled on a destination chain.

Nazarov described a world where tokenized assets have near-limitless utility. “In the future with CCIP, you shouldn’t have to worry about what blockchain the contract or the other counterparty is on, because you have a protocol that simplifies that relationship on both the level of transferring value and on the level of transferring the data related to the value.”