Chainlink Co-founder Urges US to Lead Tokenised Real-World Assets Industry to Remain Competitive in Global Finance
- Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov asserts that the US must lead global financial markets by embracing innovation related with tokenised real-world assets.
- Nazarov attributes the US government’s favourable legal and regulatory shift towards crypto, as a key proponent in real world assets transitioning to an on-chain environment.
- Nazarov proposes that the institutional DeFi community is going to represent an increasingly large share of the global financial system.
Nazarov recently spoke at the Digital Asset Summit 2025, where he focused on the intersection of real-world assets and DeFi becoming interoperable with the existing global financial system, and in particular how the US should be leading this transition.
I think the people in Washington DC understand this – They understand that the internet-based financial system was a transition from paper, and now there’s a transition from the internet-based financial system to the web3 financial system, and that understanding definitely did not exist there four or five months ago.
Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink. In a post ‘regulation by enforcement’ world, where US regulation is now more favourable towards the crypto industry, Nazarov mentions that the focus does not necessarily need to be on how to attract crypto projects and teams back to the US.
Instead, Nazarov argues that the more salient point is for these respective financial assets to get issued in the United States.
An important factor for how the US could lead the push into tokenised assets, suggests Nazarov, is its very strong domestic market, and that this can be utilised to create reliable financial assets.
Real-world assets have become a sector of increasing interest in recent years given the opportunity of tokenisation to fractionalise ownership and access new liquidity and markets, which could range anywhere from property through to agriculture.
Nazarov proposes that the DeFi ecosystem can function in the US financial system. Chainlink is a core enabler of such a proposition.
Related: Ripple Report on Australia’s Digital Future: Unlocking $12 Billion Through Asset Tokenisation
What is Chainlink?
Chainlink, co-founded by Sergey Nazarov, essentially enables interoperability both within web3 ecosystems and between web2 and web3 systems. In other words, Chainlink is considered a blockchain oracle.
Chainlink already ‘powers’ most of the DeFi world with the company now also focusing on the real-world assets sector, which some forecasts have predicted to grow to a staggering USD$16trillion industry by 2030.
With Nazarov’s recent statements regarding the integration of real-world assets and DeFi with TradFi, Chainlink allows for such possibilities with cross-chain systems, as well as the accessibility and transfer of data.
Related: Polygon CEO Mark Boiron Champions RWA Tokenisation to Transform Real Estate Investment