At the Crypto TrailBlazers event from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante sits down with Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink Labs, to unpack the infrastructure powering the next era of blockchain and decentralized finance. Nazarov explains how Chainlink’s oracle networks extend smart contract capabilities with secure, verified connections to real-world data and cross-chain resources, now enabling over 60% of global DeFi activity and more than $24 trillion in transaction value. He details how the regulatory shift in the United States is accelerating institutional adoption of tokenized assets, creating a three-year window for banks, asset managers and market infrastructures to modernize or risk losing market share.
The conversation dives deep into why oracles are critical for compliance, risk management and interoperability, including proof-of-reserves standards for stablecoins and real-time transparency to close dangerous “information gaps” in financial markets. Nazarov also discusses Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as the “TCP/IP of blockchains,” enabling programmable token transfers with embedded compliance and valuation data. He highlights emerging AI-oracle use cases for corporate actions, creating a unified “golden record” to drive efficiency across tokenized equities and funds. From lowering transaction costs to expanding global liquidity, Nazarov outlines a vision where TradFi and DeFi converge into an “internet of contracts” supporting financial, enterprise and real-world applications.
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Sergey Nazarov, Chainlink Labs
In this insightful episode of the Crypto Trailblazers series hosted by theCUBE, Mike Cagney of Figure Markets sits down with analysts from theCUBE Research to discuss groundbreaking advancements in blockchain technology and their implications for the finance sector. This video is part of the NYSE Wired digital event, aimed at bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street by integrating technology and finance.
Cagney, an eminent figure in fintech, shares expertise on the transformative role of blockchain in financial markets during this interview. Conducted by seasoned analysts at theCUBE, the discussion delves into Figure’s innovative contributions, including their blockchain-native loan origination and securitization process. He outlines how Figure leverages blockchain to achieve cost reductions, enhanced security and improved liquidity in financial transactions.
Key takeaways from the interview highlight insights on the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, such as the emergence of stablecoins as pivotal to transaction processes and the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi). Oltsik states these developments signify a shift towards democratizing finance, wherein truth and transparency are foundational. The conversation concludes with a look at Figure’s pioneering efforts in creating a new financial marketplace utilizing blockchain technology.
#CryptoTrailblazers #FigureMarkets #BlockchainInnovation #Web3 #NYEWired #BlockchainFinance #DecentralizedFinance #Fintech #Stablecoins
Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/.
Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/
Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/
00:00 - Intro
00:05 - Emerging Innovations in Financial Technology and Market Dynamics
02:45 - Key Elements in Financial Ecosystem Dynamics
06:20 - Blockchain: Truth and Transformation
09:39 - Shaping the Future: Innovations in Financial Markets and Stablecoin Integration
13:15 - Enabling the Future: Navigating Disruptions in Banking and Lending
16:51 - Exploring Opportunities and Building Confidence in the Blockchain Ecosystem
>> Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the New York Stock Exchange. You're watching theCUBE plus NYSE Wired's continuing series on Crypto Trailblazers. We're going all in this week. Sergey Nazarov is here. He is the co-founder of Chainlink Labs, a company that maintains a network that connects smart contracts to real-world data and off-chain resources. We're going to get into that in detail. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Dave Vellante
>> You're very welcome. So, Sergey, why did you and your co-founders start the company?
Sergey Nazarov
>> We saw a need for connectivity into data across chains. And beyond that, we saw the need for computations, privacy, a lot of capabilities that smart contracts don't inherently have. So, smart contracts on chains, they don't know what time it is, they don't have any access to data, they don't have access to contracts on other chains, they can't verify identity, they can't connect to existing systems. These are very big limitations that we understood pretty early on. And then, we invented something called an oracle network, which is a way to generate consensus and verification of things. So, oracle networks and Chainlink doesn't just create connectivity, it actually verifies things to make sure that before they control value, that data or that connection to another chain is accurate. And that's pretty critical because if the chain can't do that itself, it really can't do much beyond make a token and keep it on that one chain and that's it, right? So, it's actually a critical piece of infrastructure.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, beyond that narrow slice, you lose any KYC or AML. You're obviously heavily into the security aspects, which we'll get into. Give us some of the stats on your company. You power a significant portion of defi, what can you share with us?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah, so well over 60%, 65%, sometimes over 70% of defi globally is powered by the Chainlink standard. On large and popular chains, like Ethereum, it's commonly over 80% or 85% of all of defi on those chains. That's because of the security, reliability and quality of the data and connectivity that Chainlink provides. People generally in the defi world don't really want to connect to other systems than Chainlink because those systems have reliability issues, security issues, which can cost them a lot of money through what's known as an oracle hack or those types of problems. Generally speaking, at this point, the system is enabled, I think we're past $24 trillion US in transaction value has been enabled. So, I think we crossed $24 trillion at this point. That's only accelerating now with institutional adoption. I think seeing a lot of defi growth because as the whole industry grows, defi naturally grows because there's more value that gets put into lending markets and all the different parts of defi. The place where I think you're going to have even more capital coming though is the institutional side where Chainlink has also now become the leading resource for data connectivity, cross-chain connectivity, compliance, all these critical operations that go beyond just what a blockchain does.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, I mean we were stagnant in defi and Ethereum in the last certainly several years. The administration, the Trump administration obviously has a new outlook on crypto. So, let me jump to that. I mean, the regulatory climate has changed dramatically. We've seen what David Sacks is driving in the administration. We've seen the Circle IPO. We've seen stablecoins just really take off, helping, maybe, the US treasuries. How do you think about the regulatory climate, and specifically, Sergei, the durability of it? When a new administration comes in, it's like this pendulum. You think there's enough momentum now that this innovation curve can continue?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah, so the recent speech by Chairman Atkins from the SEC is I think a historic speech for our industry. And if our industry delivers on its guarantees, it'll be a historic speech for the financial system because it shows a massive shift in the regulatory environment's view of on-chain finance being the better version of the financial system. And that the on-chain version of how finance works being the right model. Now, the administration's views on crypto are very well known. They released their White House crypto report where Chainlink was heavily featured, and Oracles were brought up as a critical building block and component of this on-chain finance future. The regulators, the CFTC, the incoming new chair of the CFTC is extremely pro-crypto. The current chair of the SEC is extremely pro-crypto. And now, what you're going to have is you're going to have a solid three years of clear guidance, clear rulemaking, clear legislation that basically makes the institutional world completely comfortable with tokenization. And three years is a long enough time span that if you as an institution don't do tokenization, you will lose so much market share and you will suffer such large and prohibitively-costly consequences that even if you think there's going to be a different administration in three and a half years, you're still doing tokenization because it's legal. And then, once you get all of the institutions tokenizing, distributing that through their wealth management, distributing that for various channels of distribution, then you basically get the whole financial system hooked on tokenized equities, tokenized commodities, tokenized funds. And what I think happens then is that everybody realizes that the tokenized form of a financial product and tokenization of the financial world is actually extremely beneficial generally. So, I'm talking about clearing and settlement times 24-7, 365 markets. I'm also talking about collateral management. Collateral management is an extremely underappreciated problem. It's an extremely valuable problem. Collateral can be managed and moved now commonly on a 21-5 schedule. So, 21 hours a day, five days a week, and we're talking about tens of trillions of dollars in collateral just from these markets alone. And so, once these things are tokenized, once they're in the hands of the wealth managers, once they're in the hands of the brokers and distributors, everyone will start to understand the value that a tokenized asset brings. And our goal in the market as an infrastructure provider is to be an Oracle platform in the system that enables those tokenized assets to work correctly and better than traditional assets. So, the way that I actually measure success for our industry is that a tokenized equity, a tokenized commodity, a tokenized fund is superior to its traditional form. So, that if you have the choice between having a tokenized version or the traditional version, you would prefer the tokenized version because it has more liquidity, it can clear and settle faster, 24-7, 365, you can use it as collateral much better and with much better economics. And ideally, your AML, KYC and compliance problems go away because you've been able to automate compliance around this tokenized financial asset.
Dave Vellante
>> So, better liquidity, less friction, obviously. The collateralization is much more broad. You don't need a trusted third party. Is that right or-
Sergey Nazarov
>> The trusted third parties will still exist as far, as they are needed to comply with laws and regulatory frameworks that require things like custodians or transfer agents. And those frameworks come from a time when you couldn't prove certain things and you had to have a third party. So, I think that the regulatory landscape will continue to have a certain layer of third parties that manage risk. Because when I look at the financial system and how it's evolved, it's a lot of separate third parties that have very specific slices of the process. I'm a broker, but I'm not a custodian. I'm an exchange, but I'm not an issuer. It's very separate slices-
Dave Vellante
>> And they're taking a vig along the way, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> They are. And everyone has said like, "Oh, okay, there's all these people in the process. They're all taking something along the way." The thing that I think people don't fully realize and people that have been in the financial system for so long have gotten so used to is that some of those steps being separate from the other steps does manage risk. So, there is a value in this separation.
Dave Vellante
>> Last radius, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Right, if something goes wrong with the broker, the custodian is still safe. So, I do think that there will still be fundamental separations and those separations will mitigate risk. And so, the pieces that are separated and that you need an entity to operate that piece will still exist. Those entities though, what they'll be doing is they'll be operating Oracles smart contracts, blockchains, they'll be providing interfaces and ways for financial systems to utilize that underlying infrastructure instead of today's underlying infrastructure. So, it'll be like the internet where you had banks that adopted the internet and they became more successful as a result. And there were banks that were very slow to adopt it. And then, there were banks that didn't adopt it and are so unsuccessful they don't exist anymore because they got acquired and rolled into others. That's really what this is going to be like.
Dave Vellante
>> So, if you were hanging on to, for instance, trading fees, commissions, and that was how you were making money and the internet comes in and smashes that down to near zero, you were going to go out of business, you had to change your business model.
Sergey Nazarov
>> You could start an e-brokerage firm, that's what you should do. Looking back on that, which is a very obvious thing now, if you had a traditional brokerage firm and you saw what was happening with e-brokerage, what you should have done is you should either bought stock in e-brokerage firms or you should have started an e-brokerage firm-
Dave Vellante
>> Played the volume game. Yeah....
Sergey Nazarov
>> and you should have played the volume game, exactly. And that's the type of structural change we're talking about. And so, there were people that came out of that that were very successful, that wouldn't have been successful in the traditional brokerage world. So, it is just a different group of winners because there's this structural change, but there are still going to be winners and there's still going to be value, especially if the legal system and the way it mitigates risk says, "Well, I have to mitigate risk by keeping a brokerage firm separate from a custodian. I don't care if crypto does all this stuff, I still feel that a brokerage and a custodian is separate." So, you could still have a world where that exists just now. The brokerage is a smart contract-powered brokerage and the custodian is a blockchain-based custodian.
Dave Vellante
>> So there's plenty of ways to make money. You're just adding value in different ways-
Sergey Nazarov
>> That's right....
Dave Vellante
>> which that just answered my question, well, if you're cutting out the middlemen, what you just described, you're not really, you're just shifting-
Sergey Nazarov
>> If we look at the whole stack and we look at the whole transactional flow-
Dave Vellante
>> There's clearly less friction, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> There's less friction. There'll be parts of what middlemen do today that might not be necessary. Transfer agency is a good example. If you can use a blockchain as a source of books and records, transfer agency fundamentally has-
Dave Vellante
>> Not going to pay for that. Yep....
Sergey Nazarov
>> has different value. If transfer agency is still required, then you still need somewhere to have the keys for the transfer agent contract, which would be what's called a regulated control location. So, I think for example, the people who provide transfer agency might still exist, but their role will go from running databases to holding the keys and managing the contracts, the transfer agent contracts that do the transfer agency operation on chain now, but people might pay less for that.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, because the market will decide what it's worth. And like you say, they could maybe make it up in volume, which perhaps they can, their cost potentially will be significantly lower-
Sergey Nazarov
>> Cost will massively go down as well, yes....
Dave Vellante
>> but that leads to... Double-click on the institutional adoption because that's obviously key. It seems like they're all leaning in. If they're intelligent, they're going for it. Both institutional and I want to get to enterprise as well, but start with institutional adoption.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Institutional adoption is very sensitive to regulatory guidance everywhere I've been. So, we've worked with the Singapore Central Bank, we've worked with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Hong Kong Central Bank. We've worked with various central banks in the Middle East. We've worked with a lot of different governments at this point. And wherever you go in the world, if you're an institution, your livelihood depends on your regulator being comfortable with what you're doing and allowing you to exist at all to begin with, much less the fines they can charge you and whatever else they can do. So, the thing that's happened now is that the regulatory landscape has done a 180, and the 180 has been, "Don't do anything. We're very against this," to, "Do it as quickly as you can. We're very for this." And so, now it's become this accelerant. And there are banks and asset managers and financial market infrastructures in the US market that are more prepared in that they have been making a digital asset infrastructure investment for years. They've been building a digital asset infrastructure. Good examples are folks like JPMorgan, the DTCC, BlackRock's another good example where they have digital asset teams. Those teams are developed, they're doing thoughtful work. They've been doing that for years, even in a negative environment. So, those groups have made a strong investment. And then, I think is going to happen is that the groups that have made a strong investment will go out into the market sooner than institutions that have made no investment that are now rapidly... I mean, you should just look at the amount of job listings there are for digital asset developers, digital asset-related product managers. It's massively increased. And what I think is going to happen is that because the United States financial system and financial markets are still so big and influential, and the US is essentially a kind of super regulator that if the US does things a certain way, the rest of the regulatory bodies and the rest of the financial ecosystem out in the rest of the world wants to be compatible with the US because of the size of the US market. So, basically, if the US says, "It's okay to make tokenized equities this way. It's okay to make more tokenized funds this way. It's okay to make tokenized commodities this way. It's okay to do cross-chain transactions. It's okay to prove identity and do AML, KYC compliance on-chain." All of those problems being clarified and solved means that not only does the US accelerate, but it accelerates the rest of the world. So, I think the institutional adoption in the US is really now the most important measure of where our industry is going to go from an institutional point of view. And we're involved in a lot of conversations with the top institutions. We've announced public work with many of them already, and I can tell you that those conversations are moving rapidly towards production.
Dave Vellante
>> The pendulum has swung clearly from, "No crypto. You can't do crypto," to, "Let's go. Let's make this the innovation center of the world," as you just described very well. What are the risks? Because anytime you loosen regulations down the road, people will find ways to game the system. What are the risks in your view that should be managed over the next five, six years with this new regulatory climate?
Sergey Nazarov
>> I think there's a balance between being so permissive that people can create scams and they can misinform inappropriately and steal money from vulnerable groups. And the other end of the spectrum is you create regulation that's so constraining that the economics don't make sense and that nothing develops, right? So, you don't want to be at either of those extremes. I think the very good thing about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, oracle networks, all of these advanced systems powered by smart contracts is that they can mitigate the scam aspect if you make them work a certain way. So, if you make the smart contract have to have a certain threshold of reserves in order to issue a new stable coin. So, if you have a proof of reserves oracle that proves that the assets or the cash are there to back the additional stable coin, then you can create an automated type of compliance. And so, your risk on the scam side can be managed through technology. And that's actually a lot of the work we're doing with various governments, including the US government, the legislative branch, the executive branch regulators. We are advocating very heavily for technical standards for cross-chain interoperability, which we're a leader in for on-chain compliance, which we're a leader in for data on-chain, which we're the global leader in, and how to make all of those aspects of a smart contract meet certain standards. So, I think the thing people don't fully understand, which is a very powerful feature of our industry, is that you can technically guarantee that a stable coin works a certain way. You can technically guarantee that the tokenized fund or the tokenized equity or the tokenized commodity is guaranteed to be secured by something in a certain way. And there is no world there where like a CDO manager or somebody can go in the background and change the risk ratios and change the exposure of the asset and the bank and the system without people knowing about that. Like was done in 2008, where there were a few limited groups that knew the exposure, but the vast majority of people didn't understand the exposure. I'll give you an example. In lending markets in defi, for example, run by predominantly by Aave, the leading provider, what you have is extreme transparency about your risk and your solvency when you're giving an asset to be loaned. So, you know the liquidation conditions, you know the collateral involved, and you know that the smart contract can't deviate from that. So, basically, if you put money into Aave, you have the same information as the CEO of Aave. You have the same level of information. That's like you would have the same information as the CEO of the bank where you have your money. You don't have that right now and that's because the systems of the bank, they don't disclose that to you because they don't have to do that. They don't do that in general technically. But this is the thing people don't understand is that you want to be permissive from the economic point of view of what people can do, that they can tokenize equities, they can tokenize commodities, they can tokenize funds, but then you want to create thoughtful conditions, technical conditions, that mitigate your downside risk. So, for example, you should require proof of reserves for stablecoins. The new stablecoin bill did require that, it required it on a quarterly basis and it required it proven off-chain. We're going to be pushing more and more for that to be required on-chain on a second-by-second basis. So, now there's more proof on-chain. For tokenization of funds, tokenization of equities, tokenization of commodities, you can require certain standards proving that the underlying assets are there, proving that they are in a certain state of valuation. So, you can provide valuation data on a regular basis to show whether the asset you hold is in a certain state of value. For compliance, you can mitigate compliance risks by automating that compliance process and proving that the compliance process was done correctly by verifying information and putting that verified information on-chain. So, the traditional spectrum of regulatory risk here can be massively short-circuited through these technical standards.
Dave Vellante
>> So, it's that great discussion. Thank you. It's that transparency, the proof of reserves, essentially it's an automated technology is adjudicating that. And to the extent that you can get second-by-second, you're now talking about highly-granular updates, that's virtually real time. Okay.
Sergey Nazarov
>> That's right. And just to clarify, just so you know, that's where all the problems happen. It's called the gap problem. So, for example, Bernie Madoff had a 20-30 year gap in which you could do things right? Silicon Valley Bank had a few months gap where their treasuries weren't managed the way people thought they were managed. Lehman Brothers had a few years gap where people didn't understand the risk exposure. But imagine if you had a system that automatically floated all the information publicly, so that the market and the regulators and everybody can understand everything as well as John Paulson or as well as anyone on a second-by-second basis instead of on a 20-year basis or a two, three year basis or a two, three month basis. It's this gap of information that these highly-automated, highly-transparent systems that are able to verify things can close. And when you close that information gap, you get to efficient markets, you get to more liquidity, you get, really, to a better world.
Dave Vellante
>> I want to ask you a couple questions in the limited time we have remaining. You've developed the cross-chain interoperability protocol, CCIP. That has always been one of the biggest challenges of blockchain, is that interoperability. I'm curious as if you could discuss what that is, how these standards are being set, how they're being adopted? And then, how you're securing all this cross-chain... Long question. And then, as we get into agentic and AI, they can work in that little one-second, sub-second ranges much faster than humans can. So, take us through how you're thinking about that whole spectrum.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Sure. So, CCIP is the leading cross-chain interoperability platform and standard for the institutional world right now. We have a lot of users that are adopting it. Lots of large institutions have announced and started implementing it. Basically, it solves the very simple problem of liquidity being fragmented. So, because so many different institutions have so many different chains of their own, because there are so many different public chains, each of those chains houses liquidity. It houses users money in the form of stable coins or cryptocurrencies or various tokenized assets and chains are not able to inherently connect to each other. So, if you launch a chain and I launch a chain, those two chains can't communicate with each other. I can't send you a token from my chain to your chain, and you can't send me data from your chain to my chain without a cross-chain system. Similarly to how on the internet, if I had a database and you had a database, we would need TCP/IP to connect our two databases to allow them to exchange information. So that's really what CCIP is. It's the TCP/IP of the blockchain world, interconnecting all these blockchains. And because the blockchain world is so highly financialized and has so much focus on financial products and systems, that means that that system inherently becomes a way to transmit and transfer value. So, the main use of CCIP right now is to transmit tokens, valuable tokens, a stablecoin from me to you, from my chain to your chain. And then, you will transmit from your chain to my chain, your tokenized fund that you're selling me. And so, we're able to do a delivery versus payment transaction. There's also the need to transmit data. So, CCIP is able to add critical data to the transaction such as compliance data, identity data, valuation data. And this is something that other cross-chain systems or protocols simply can't do. We are able to layer in critical pieces of information that travel with the token in something called programmable token transfers. And now, that critical information reaches your chain together with the token, and that allows you to process the token and process the transaction around the token very efficiently. So, there's all these various benefits. The AI dimension, that's where we have something called AI oracles. So, AI oracles are basically off-chain systems that house AI, and in many cases various Ais. And those various AIs come to agreement for the verification of something. We do that right now for corporate actions in a system called CALM, corporate action lifecycle management. Corporate actions are a very not sexy thing, but they're actually very important for tokenized equities to come on-chain, and in some ways for tokenized funds. And so, what we do there is we run multiple AIs in an oracle. Those AIs scrub and verify corporate action events like dividends, votes, various events, and then they put that event on-chain. That on-chain event creates what we call a unified golden record. So, it creates a golden source of truth that then everyone can drive their systems off of. And then, CCIP makes sure that that golden source of truth is accessible to contracts on other chains. So, if you have a corporate action event around the tokenized equity that gets put on-chain through an AI oracle, then CCIP allows access to that corporate action event on that chain back to the thousands of other chains that want to know about it. And so, now what you've created really is this highly transparent model of information and risk management that I've told you about, where the traditional corporate actions system costs hundreds of millions of dollars in error fees every year to the capital markets. This system creates a single golden record that everyone drives their system off of. So, you have transparency. This system can be rapidly updated, and this system can allow you to drive all your other processes in other places in an automated way over the cross-chain bridge.
Dave Vellante
>> So, the agents collaborate, they come to an agreement, and then that's how the golden record gets established. If a mistake is made, it's transparent and can be fixed?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Well, ideally, this mistake isn't made, just to be very clear.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay, but bad things happen sometimes, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> If it is made, then because you have a golden record, there's a lot of other folks that can verify that record if they want to before relying on it. Whereas before, they would just have to take the word of the corporate action provider. So, we're moving from a model where there's all these siloed data sources, data systems, value-holding systems, into a world of highly-transparent smart contracts that are also hyper-connected and that's why you have that low friction movement of liquidity. The low friction movement of liquidity is actually the main reason why the cryptocurrency industry is so successful, because when you launch some kind of asset in a traditional financial system due to how locked down that system is, you only get access to the domestic market of that specific country. So, if you launch something in the Dubai financial system, you get access to the Dubai and Emirates financial universe and user base. If you launch something in the Singapore financial system, you get Singapore, Asia, and a few other places. But if you launch a token, if you launch a cryptocurrency, if you launch an NFT, if you launch a meme coin, whatever you launch on a public blockchain, you instantly get access to global liquidity. And even though that's now a parallel financial system, that parallel financial system, because it's inherently global, has now grown to over $4 trillion.
Dave Vellante
>> And for the reasons you mentioned before, it's superior and it's this frictionless environment. When did you start the company, what year?
Sergey Nazarov
>> So, Chainlink was launched in 2017.
Dave Vellante
>> And how did you fund the company? Was it an ICO? Was it-
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah, so there was initially a token sale, and that went well and we had a lot of initial supporters. We were the first ones to really do oracles in general, and now we're the leading oracle platform for the entire industry. So, the Chainlink system really originated and invented the oracle network, which is the way that you have multiple oracles agree and verify things, just like blockchains have multiple nodes, agree and verify blocks. So, that's really the difference is that blockchains verify blocks of transactions and oracle networks verify all these other things I told you about, data, connectivity, identity, AI, verification. All of these other topics can be run in an Oracle.
Dave Vellante
>> So, you used an analogy of CCIP, like TCP/IP.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Do you feel it will have the same impact in terms of its ability to support an industry's growth? It sounds like a similar trajectory. Will it be, in your view, as big? I mean, confined to the financial system, which is enormous, how do you see that?
Sergey Nazarov
>> I mean, we're working very hard as a group of community members at Chainlink that want to see CCIP become a global standard. We have the largest institutions in the world now publicly explaining how they're adopting it and how they're using it and how they're using it in transactions with other large institutions. So, I would say it's on a very solid trajectory at this point. So, I do think that the cost of operating a blockchain will go down, that the cost of doing tokenization as a process will go down, which means there'll be more chains and there'll be more tokens of different types on those chains. And because chains inherently don't communicate with each other, all of those tokens and all of those chains and all of that fragmentation will have to be solved. And CCIP, right now, in my opinion, is the leading resource to solve it in a secure, reliable way that also allows you to do transactions that comply with compliance, data, accounting, and various other key requirements which aren't going away. So, my hope is that CCIP and the Chainlink standard in general gets adopted in the tradfi world, the way it's been adopted in the defi world. And then, I think the defi and the tradfi world will merge into a single internet of contracts, into a single collection of highly connected blockchains. And then, you'll have use cases on those blockchains beyond financial use cases. You'll have gaming use cases, you'll have supply chain use cases, you'll have insurance use cases, and they will also use standards and those rails.
Dave Vellante
>> So, the institutional adoption obviously happens first, that builds the trust. And then, you're describing massive enterprise adoption. Sergey, fascinating conversation. Congratulations on all the progress, and-
Sergey Nazarov
>> Thank you....
Dave Vellante
>> a really fascinating time for this industry, isn't it?
Sergey Nazarov
>> It's very exciting. I think with all this government support, the next three, three and a half years are going to be extremely positive for our industry. I'm very excited. I've never been more hopeful about our industry becoming the way the world works.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, thanks so much for spending some time with us. Really appreciate it.
Sergey Nazarov
>> My pleasure.
Dave Vellante
>> And thank you for watching theCUBE plus NYSE Wired's Crypto Trailblazers. We'll be right back right after this short break from the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Dave Vellante with John Furrier. We'll be right back.
>> Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the New York Stock Exchange. You're watching theCUBE plus NYSE Wired's continuing series on Crypto Trailblazers. We're going all in this week. Sergey Nazarov is here. He is the co-founder of Chainlink Labs, a company that maintains a network that connects smart contracts to real-world data and off-chain resources. We're going to get into that in detail. Thanks for coming in. Appreciate it.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Dave Vellante
>> You're very welcome. So, Sergey, why did you and your co-founders start the company?
Sergey Nazarov
>> We saw a need for connectivity into data across chains. And beyond that, we saw the need for computations, privacy, a lot of capabilities that smart contracts don't inherently have. So, smart contracts on chains, they don't know what time it is, they don't have any access to data, they don't have access to contracts on other chains, they can't verify identity, they can't connect to existing systems. These are very big limitations that we understood pretty early on. And then, we invented something called an oracle network, which is a way to generate consensus and verification of things. So, oracle networks and Chainlink doesn't just create connectivity, it actually verifies things to make sure that before they control value, that data or that connection to another chain is accurate. And that's pretty critical because if the chain can't do that itself, it really can't do much beyond make a token and keep it on that one chain and that's it, right? So, it's actually a critical piece of infrastructure.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, beyond that narrow slice, you lose any KYC or AML. You're obviously heavily into the security aspects, which we'll get into. Give us some of the stats on your company. You power a significant portion of defi, what can you share with us?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah, so well over 60%, 65%, sometimes over 70% of defi globally is powered by the Chainlink standard. On large and popular chains, like Ethereum, it's commonly over 80% or 85% of all of defi on those chains. That's because of the security, reliability and quality of the data and connectivity that Chainlink provides. People generally in the defi world don't really want to connect to other systems than Chainlink because those systems have reliability issues, security issues, which can cost them a lot of money through what's known as an oracle hack or those types of problems. Generally speaking, at this point, the system is enabled, I think we're past $24 trillion US in transaction value has been enabled. So, I think we crossed $24 trillion at this point. That's only accelerating now with institutional adoption. I think seeing a lot of defi growth because as the whole industry grows, defi naturally grows because there's more value that gets put into lending markets and all the different parts of defi. The place where I think you're going to have even more capital coming though is the institutional side where Chainlink has also now become the leading resource for data connectivity, cross-chain connectivity, compliance, all these critical operations that go beyond just what a blockchain does.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, I mean we were stagnant in defi and Ethereum in the last certainly several years. The administration, the Trump administration obviously has a new outlook on crypto. So, let me jump to that. I mean, the regulatory climate has changed dramatically. We've seen what David Sacks is driving in the administration. We've seen the Circle IPO. We've seen stablecoins just really take off, helping, maybe, the US treasuries. How do you think about the regulatory climate, and specifically, Sergei, the durability of it? When a new administration comes in, it's like this pendulum. You think there's enough momentum now that this innovation curve can continue?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah, so the recent speech by Chairman Atkins from the SEC is I think a historic speech for our industry. And if our industry delivers on its guarantees, it'll be a historic speech for the financial system because it shows a massive shift in the regulatory environment's view of on-chain finance being the better version of the financial system. And that the on-chain version of how finance works being the right model. Now, the administration's views on crypto are very well known. They released their White House crypto report where Chainlink was heavily featured, and Oracles were brought up as a critical building block and component of this on-chain finance future. The regulators, the CFTC, the incoming new chair of the CFTC is extremely pro-crypto. The current chair of the SEC is extremely pro-crypto. And now, what you're going to have is you're going to have a solid three years of clear guidance, clear rulemaking, clear legislation that basically makes the institutional world completely comfortable with tokenization. And three years is a long enough time span that if you as an institution don't do tokenization, you will lose so much market share and you will suffer such large and prohibitively-costly consequences that even if you think there's going to be a different administration in three and a half years, you're still doing tokenization because it's legal. And then, once you get all of the institutions tokenizing, distributing that through their wealth management, distributing that for various channels of distribution, then you basically get the whole financial system hooked on tokenized equities, tokenized commodities, tokenized funds. And what I think happens then is that everybody realizes that the tokenized form of a financial product and tokenization of the financial world is actually extremely beneficial generally. So, I'm talking about clearing and settlement times 24-7, 365 markets. I'm also talking about collateral management. Collateral management is an extremely underappreciated problem. It's an extremely valuable problem. Collateral can be managed and moved now commonly on a 21-5 schedule. So, 21 hours a day, five days a week, and we're talking about tens of trillions of dollars in collateral just from these markets alone. And so, once these things are tokenized, once they're in the hands of the wealth managers, once they're in the hands of the brokers and distributors, everyone will start to understand the value that a tokenized asset brings. And our goal in the market as an infrastructure provider is to be an Oracle platform in the system that enables those tokenized assets to work correctly and better than traditional assets. So, the way that I actually measure success for our industry is that a tokenized equity, a tokenized commodity, a tokenized fund is superior to its traditional form. So, that if you have the choice between having a tokenized version or the traditional version, you would prefer the tokenized version because it has more liquidity, it can clear and settle faster, 24-7, 365, you can use it as collateral much better and with much better economics. And ideally, your AML, KYC and compliance problems go away because you've been able to automate compliance around this tokenized financial asset.
Dave Vellante
>> So, better liquidity, less friction, obviously. The collateralization is much more broad. You don't need a trusted third party. Is that right or-
Sergey Nazarov
>> The trusted third parties will still exist as far, as they are needed to comply with laws and regulatory frameworks that require things like custodians or transfer agents. And those frameworks come from a time when you couldn't prove certain things and you had to have a third party. So, I think that the regulatory landscape will continue to have a certain layer of third parties that manage risk. Because when I look at the financial system and how it's evolved, it's a lot of separate third parties that have very specific slices of the process. I'm a broker, but I'm not a custodian. I'm an exchange, but I'm not an issuer. It's very separate slices-
Dave Vellante
>> And they're taking a vig along the way, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> They are. And everyone has said like, "Oh, okay, there's all these people in the process. They're all taking something along the way." The thing that I think people don't fully realize and people that have been in the financial system for so long have gotten so used to is that some of those steps being separate from the other steps does manage risk. So, there is a value in this separation.
Dave Vellante
>> Last radius, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Right, if something goes wrong with the broker, the custodian is still safe. So, I do think that there will still be fundamental separations and those separations will mitigate risk. And so, the pieces that are separated and that you need an entity to operate that piece will still exist. Those entities though, what they'll be doing is they'll be operating Oracles smart contracts, blockchains, they'll be providing interfaces and ways for financial systems to utilize that underlying infrastructure instead of today's underlying infrastructure. So, it'll be like the internet where you had banks that adopted the internet and they became more successful as a result. And there were banks that were very slow to adopt it. And then, there were banks that didn't adopt it and are so unsuccessful they don't exist anymore because they got acquired and rolled into others. That's really what this is going to be like.
Dave Vellante
>> So, if you were hanging on to, for instance, trading fees, commissions, and that was how you were making money and the internet comes in and smashes that down to near zero, you were going to go out of business, you had to change your business model.
Sergey Nazarov
>> You could start an e-brokerage firm, that's what you should do. Looking back on that, which is a very obvious thing now, if you had a traditional brokerage firm and you saw what was happening with e-brokerage, what you should have done is you should either bought stock in e-brokerage firms or you should have started an e-brokerage firm-
Dave Vellante
>> Played the volume game. Yeah....
Sergey Nazarov
>> and you should have played the volume game, exactly. And that's the type of structural change we're talking about. And so, there were people that came out of that that were very successful, that wouldn't have been successful in the traditional brokerage world. So, it is just a different group of winners because there's this structural change, but there are still going to be winners and there's still going to be value, especially if the legal system and the way it mitigates risk says, "Well, I have to mitigate risk by keeping a brokerage firm separate from a custodian. I don't care if crypto does all this stuff, I still feel that a brokerage and a custodian is separate." So, you could still have a world where that exists just now. The brokerage is a smart contract-powered brokerage and the custodian is a blockchain-based custodian.
Dave Vellante
>> So there's plenty of ways to make money. You're just adding value in different ways-
Sergey Nazarov
>> That's right....
Dave Vellante
>> which that just answered my question, well, if you're cutting out the middlemen, what you just described, you're not really, you're just shifting-
Sergey Nazarov
>> If we look at the whole stack and we look at the whole transactional flow-
Dave Vellante
>> There's clearly less friction, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> There's less friction. There'll be parts of what middlemen do today that might not be necessary. Transfer agency is a good example. If you can use a blockchain as a source of books and records, transfer agency fundamentally has-
Dave Vellante
>> Not going to pay for that. Yep....
Sergey Nazarov
>> has different value. If transfer agency is still required, then you still need somewhere to have the keys for the transfer agent contract, which would be what's called a regulated control location. So, I think for example, the people who provide transfer agency might still exist, but their role will go from running databases to holding the keys and managing the contracts, the transfer agent contracts that do the transfer agency operation on chain now, but people might pay less for that.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, because the market will decide what it's worth. And like you say, they could maybe make it up in volume, which perhaps they can, their cost potentially will be significantly lower-
Sergey Nazarov
>> Cost will massively go down as well, yes....
Dave Vellante
>> but that leads to... Double-click on the institutional adoption because that's obviously key. It seems like they're all leaning in. If they're intelligent, they're going for it. Both institutional and I want to get to enterprise as well, but start with institutional adoption.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Institutional adoption is very sensitive to regulatory guidance everywhere I've been. So, we've worked with the Singapore Central Bank, we've worked with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Hong Kong Central Bank. We've worked with various central banks in the Middle East. We've worked with a lot of different governments at this point. And wherever you go in the world, if you're an institution, your livelihood depends on your regulator being comfortable with what you're doing and allowing you to exist at all to begin with, much less the fines they can charge you and whatever else they can do. So, the thing that's happened now is that the regulatory landscape has done a 180, and the 180 has been, "Don't do anything. We're very against this," to, "Do it as quickly as you can. We're very for this." And so, now it's become this accelerant. And there are banks and asset managers and financial market infrastructures in the US market that are more prepared in that they have been making a digital asset infrastructure investment for years. They've been building a digital asset infrastructure. Good examples are folks like JPMorgan, the DTCC, BlackRock's another good example where they have digital asset teams. Those teams are developed, they're doing thoughtful work. They've been doing that for years, even in a negative environment. So, those groups have made a strong investment. And then, I think is going to happen is that the groups that have made a strong investment will go out into the market sooner than institutions that have made no investment that are now rapidly... I mean, you should just look at the amount of job listings there are for digital asset developers, digital asset-related product managers. It's massively increased. And what I think is going to happen is that because the United States financial system and financial markets are still so big and influential, and the US is essentially a kind of super regulator that if the US does things a certain way, the rest of the regulatory bodies and the rest of the financial ecosystem out in the rest of the world wants to be compatible with the US because of the size of the US market. So, basically, if the US says, "It's okay to make tokenized equities this way. It's okay to make more tokenized funds this way. It's okay to make tokenized commodities this way. It's okay to do cross-chain transactions. It's okay to prove identity and do AML, KYC compliance on-chain." All of those problems being clarified and solved means that not only does the US accelerate, but it accelerates the rest of the world. So, I think the institutional adoption in the US is really now the most important measure of where our industry is going to go from an institutional point of view. And we're involved in a lot of conversations with the top institutions. We've announced public work with many of them already, and I can tell you that those conversations are moving rapidly towards production.
Dave Vellante
>> The pendulum has swung clearly from, "No crypto. You can't do crypto," to, "Let's go. Let's make this the innovation center of the world," as you just described very well. What are the risks? Because anytime you loosen regulations down the road, people will find ways to game the system. What are the risks in your view that should be managed over the next five, six years with this new regulatory climate?
Sergey Nazarov
>> I think there's a balance between being so permissive that people can create scams and they can misinform inappropriately and steal money from vulnerable groups. And the other end of the spectrum is you create regulation that's so constraining that the economics don't make sense and that nothing develops, right? So, you don't want to be at either of those extremes. I think the very good thing about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, oracle networks, all of these advanced systems powered by smart contracts is that they can mitigate the scam aspect if you make them work a certain way. So, if you make the smart contract have to have a certain threshold of reserves in order to issue a new stable coin. So, if you have a proof of reserves oracle that proves that the assets or the cash are there to back the additional stable coin, then you can create an automated type of compliance. And so, your risk on the scam side can be managed through technology. And that's actually a lot of the work we're doing with various governments, including the US government, the legislative branch, the executive branch regulators. We are advocating very heavily for technical standards for cross-chain interoperability, which we're a leader in for on-chain compliance, which we're a leader in for data on-chain, which we're the global leader in, and how to make all of those aspects of a smart contract meet certain standards. So, I think the thing people don't fully understand, which is a very powerful feature of our industry, is that you can technically guarantee that a stable coin works a certain way. You can technically guarantee that the tokenized fund or the tokenized equity or the tokenized commodity is guaranteed to be secured by something in a certain way. And there is no world there where like a CDO manager or somebody can go in the background and change the risk ratios and change the exposure of the asset and the bank and the system without people knowing about that. Like was done in 2008, where there were a few limited groups that knew the exposure, but the vast majority of people didn't understand the exposure. I'll give you an example. In lending markets in defi, for example, run by predominantly by Aave, the leading provider, what you have is extreme transparency about your risk and your solvency when you're giving an asset to be loaned. So, you know the liquidation conditions, you know the collateral involved, and you know that the smart contract can't deviate from that. So, basically, if you put money into Aave, you have the same information as the CEO of Aave. You have the same level of information. That's like you would have the same information as the CEO of the bank where you have your money. You don't have that right now and that's because the systems of the bank, they don't disclose that to you because they don't have to do that. They don't do that in general technically. But this is the thing people don't understand is that you want to be permissive from the economic point of view of what people can do, that they can tokenize equities, they can tokenize commodities, they can tokenize funds, but then you want to create thoughtful conditions, technical conditions, that mitigate your downside risk. So, for example, you should require proof of reserves for stablecoins. The new stablecoin bill did require that, it required it on a quarterly basis and it required it proven off-chain. We're going to be pushing more and more for that to be required on-chain on a second-by-second basis. So, now there's more proof on-chain. For tokenization of funds, tokenization of equities, tokenization of commodities, you can require certain standards proving that the underlying assets are there, proving that they are in a certain state of valuation. So, you can provide valuation data on a regular basis to show whether the asset you hold is in a certain state of value. For compliance, you can mitigate compliance risks by automating that compliance process and proving that the compliance process was done correctly by verifying information and putting that verified information on-chain. So, the traditional spectrum of regulatory risk here can be massively short-circuited through these technical standards.
Dave Vellante
>> So, it's that great discussion. Thank you. It's that transparency, the proof of reserves, essentially it's an automated technology is adjudicating that. And to the extent that you can get second-by-second, you're now talking about highly-granular updates, that's virtually real time. Okay.
Sergey Nazarov
>> That's right. And just to clarify, just so you know, that's where all the problems happen. It's called the gap problem. So, for example, Bernie Madoff had a 20-30 year gap in which you could do things right? Silicon Valley Bank had a few months gap where their treasuries weren't managed the way people thought they were managed. Lehman Brothers had a few years gap where people didn't understand the risk exposure. But imagine if you had a system that automatically floated all the information publicly, so that the market and the regulators and everybody can understand everything as well as John Paulson or as well as anyone on a second-by-second basis instead of on a 20-year basis or a two, three year basis or a two, three month basis. It's this gap of information that these highly-automated, highly-transparent systems that are able to verify things can close. And when you close that information gap, you get to efficient markets, you get to more liquidity, you get, really, to a better world.
Dave Vellante
>> I want to ask you a couple questions in the limited time we have remaining. You've developed the cross-chain interoperability protocol, CCIP. That has always been one of the biggest challenges of blockchain, is that interoperability. I'm curious as if you could discuss what that is, how these standards are being set, how they're being adopted? And then, how you're securing all this cross-chain... Long question. And then, as we get into agentic and AI, they can work in that little one-second, sub-second ranges much faster than humans can. So, take us through how you're thinking about that whole spectrum.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Sure. So, CCIP is the leading cross-chain interoperability platform and standard for the institutional world right now. We have a lot of users that are adopting it. Lots of large institutions have announced and started implementing it. Basically, it solves the very simple problem of liquidity being fragmented. So, because so many different institutions have so many different chains of their own, because there are so many different public chains, each of those chains houses liquidity. It houses users money in the form of stable coins or cryptocurrencies or various tokenized assets and chains are not able to inherently connect to each other. So, if you launch a chain and I launch a chain, those two chains can't communicate with each other. I can't send you a token from my chain to your chain, and you can't send me data from your chain to my chain without a cross-chain system. Similarly to how on the internet, if I had a database and you had a database, we would need TCP/IP to connect our two databases to allow them to exchange information. So that's really what CCIP is. It's the TCP/IP of the blockchain world, interconnecting all these blockchains. And because the blockchain world is so highly financialized and has so much focus on financial products and systems, that means that that system inherently becomes a way to transmit and transfer value. So, the main use of CCIP right now is to transmit tokens, valuable tokens, a stablecoin from me to you, from my chain to your chain. And then, you will transmit from your chain to my chain, your tokenized fund that you're selling me. And so, we're able to do a delivery versus payment transaction. There's also the need to transmit data. So, CCIP is able to add critical data to the transaction such as compliance data, identity data, valuation data. And this is something that other cross-chain systems or protocols simply can't do. We are able to layer in critical pieces of information that travel with the token in something called programmable token transfers. And now, that critical information reaches your chain together with the token, and that allows you to process the token and process the transaction around the token very efficiently. So, there's all these various benefits. The AI dimension, that's where we have something called AI oracles. So, AI oracles are basically off-chain systems that house AI, and in many cases various Ais. And those various AIs come to agreement for the verification of something. We do that right now for corporate actions in a system called CALM, corporate action lifecycle management. Corporate actions are a very not sexy thing, but they're actually very important for tokenized equities to come on-chain, and in some ways for tokenized funds. And so, what we do there is we run multiple AIs in an oracle. Those AIs scrub and verify corporate action events like dividends, votes, various events, and then they put that event on-chain. That on-chain event creates what we call a unified golden record. So, it creates a golden source of truth that then everyone can drive their systems off of. And then, CCIP makes sure that that golden source of truth is accessible to contracts on other chains. So, if you have a corporate action event around the tokenized equity that gets put on-chain through an AI oracle, then CCIP allows access to that corporate action event on that chain back to the thousands of other chains that want to know about it. And so, now what you've created really is this highly transparent model of information and risk management that I've told you about, where the traditional corporate actions system costs hundreds of millions of dollars in error fees every year to the capital markets. This system creates a single golden record that everyone drives their system off of. So, you have transparency. This system can be rapidly updated, and this system can allow you to drive all your other processes in other places in an automated way over the cross-chain bridge.
Dave Vellante
>> So, the agents collaborate, they come to an agreement, and then that's how the golden record gets established. If a mistake is made, it's transparent and can be fixed?
Sergey Nazarov
>> Well, ideally, this mistake isn't made, just to be very clear.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay, but bad things happen sometimes, right?
Sergey Nazarov
>> If it is made, then because you have a golden record, there's a lot of other folks that can verify that record if they want to before relying on it. Whereas before, they would just have to take the word of the corporate action provider. So, we're moving from a model where there's all these siloed data sources, data systems, value-holding systems, into a world of highly-transparent smart contracts that are also hyper-connected and that's why you have that low friction movement of liquidity. The low friction movement of liquidity is actually the main reason why the cryptocurrency industry is so successful, because when you launch some kind of asset in a traditional financial system due to how locked down that system is, you only get access to the domestic market of that specific country. So, if you launch something in the Dubai financial system, you get access to the Dubai and Emirates financial universe and user base. If you launch something in the Singapore financial system, you get Singapore, Asia, and a few other places. But if you launch a token, if you launch a cryptocurrency, if you launch an NFT, if you launch a meme coin, whatever you launch on a public blockchain, you instantly get access to global liquidity. And even though that's now a parallel financial system, that parallel financial system, because it's inherently global, has now grown to over $4 trillion.
Dave Vellante
>> And for the reasons you mentioned before, it's superior and it's this frictionless environment. When did you start the company, what year?
Sergey Nazarov
>> So, Chainlink was launched in 2017.
Dave Vellante
>> And how did you fund the company? Was it an ICO? Was it-
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah, so there was initially a token sale, and that went well and we had a lot of initial supporters. We were the first ones to really do oracles in general, and now we're the leading oracle platform for the entire industry. So, the Chainlink system really originated and invented the oracle network, which is the way that you have multiple oracles agree and verify things, just like blockchains have multiple nodes, agree and verify blocks. So, that's really the difference is that blockchains verify blocks of transactions and oracle networks verify all these other things I told you about, data, connectivity, identity, AI, verification. All of these other topics can be run in an Oracle.
Dave Vellante
>> So, you used an analogy of CCIP, like TCP/IP.
Sergey Nazarov
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> Do you feel it will have the same impact in terms of its ability to support an industry's growth? It sounds like a similar trajectory. Will it be, in your view, as big? I mean, confined to the financial system, which is enormous, how do you see that?
Sergey Nazarov
>> I mean, we're working very hard as a group of community members at Chainlink that want to see CCIP become a global standard. We have the largest institutions in the world now publicly explaining how they're adopting it and how they're using it and how they're using it in transactions with other large institutions. So, I would say it's on a very solid trajectory at this point. So, I do think that the cost of operating a blockchain will go down, that the cost of doing tokenization as a process will go down, which means there'll be more chains and there'll be more tokens of different types on those chains. And because chains inherently don't communicate with each other, all of those tokens and all of those chains and all of that fragmentation will have to be solved. And CCIP, right now, in my opinion, is the leading resource to solve it in a secure, reliable way that also allows you to do transactions that comply with compliance, data, accounting, and various other key requirements which aren't going away. So, my hope is that CCIP and the Chainlink standard in general gets adopted in the tradfi world, the way it's been adopted in the defi world. And then, I think the defi and the tradfi world will merge into a single internet of contracts, into a single collection of highly connected blockchains. And then, you'll have use cases on those blockchains beyond financial use cases. You'll have gaming use cases, you'll have supply chain use cases, you'll have insurance use cases, and they will also use standards and those rails.
Dave Vellante
>> So, the institutional adoption obviously happens first, that builds the trust. And then, you're describing massive enterprise adoption. Sergey, fascinating conversation. Congratulations on all the progress, and-
Sergey Nazarov
>> Thank you....
Dave Vellante
>> a really fascinating time for this industry, isn't it?
Sergey Nazarov
>> It's very exciting. I think with all this government support, the next three, three and a half years are going to be extremely positive for our industry. I'm very excited. I've never been more hopeful about our industry becoming the way the world works.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, thanks so much for spending some time with us. Really appreciate it.
Sergey Nazarov
>> My pleasure.
Dave Vellante
>> And thank you for watching theCUBE plus NYSE Wired's Crypto Trailblazers. We'll be right back right after this short break from the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Dave Vellante with John Furrier. We'll be right back.
Dave Vellante