加密货币已走出梦想期，我们进入“大玩家时代”

It's very funny that institutions are now the biggest proponents of crypto and blockchains, and that if you go on crypto Twitter, a lot of people are just going into AI today or other things. I think what has happened is that our industry went through 2 different phases. The first phase was a dreaming phase where everything was new, romanticized, and amazing. I miss those days too, by the way. Don't get me wrong.

I miss the hackathons. I miss meeting builders. I miss all of that dreaming phase, right? We're not in the dreaming phase anymore. We're in the big-boy phase. Stuff is actually happening. Your crowd is not the hacker who's been at a hackathon for 48 hours, hasn't slept, and is powered by Red Bull.

Your crowd is institutional. Frankly, it's a different crowd. It's a big shift. Believe me, for me too. But that's a shift we have to take if you want to go from dreaming to actually building stuff and changing the world.

I'm DeFi Dad here with Nomadic. Today's show features Johann Eid, chief business officer at Chainlink Labs. Johann, thank you for joining us. How are you doing?

Thanks for having me on. I'm a big fan of the show, and I'm doing amazingly well. Thank you.

This one will be a bit of a mixed bag. I feel like there's just a lot of stuff that Chainlink is doing, and I think it's easy to lose sight of it. I think people still think of Chainlink as just oracle price feeds, but there's a ton that you guys are doing.

1. What finally pushed TradFi to move onchain

I want to get into the institutional side. I feel like you have a much better line of sight into what's going on in that world than DeFi Dad and I do. I want to learn more about this thing you call orchestration. You're also brushing up against prediction markets and AI agents, and we just want to know where Chainlink is headed in the near-term and midterm future.

2. How DeFi transformed from lofty ideas to real use cases

Johann, you haven't been on this show before, but I know you've been in crypto for a really long time. You sort of had a front-row seat to this whole evolution of crypto. Maybe just give us some of your thoughts on how it's changed, how you've seen the industry evolve, and, honestly, hopefully you see light at the end of the tunnel here.

I joined crypto around 8 years ago, and as soon as I joined, I started working on infrastructure. I've been at Chainlink for around 7 years. Before I joined Chainlink, I was on another project working on infrastructure. Back in the day, we were working on cross-chain, which was way too early back then, because back then you only had Ethereum, and that's basically it, right?

How have we changed? Crypto got free. Back when I joined, in 2017 or 2016, it was basically all white papers. Whenever you read the white paper, it sounded great, right? It sounded amazing: “Oh, we're going to change the world. We're going to tokenize Airbnb. We're going to tokenize Uber, and everything will live on-chain,” right?

But it was a lot of dreaming, and frankly, if you look at it now, fairy tales. Some good ideas, some very, very bad ideas. Where are we today? Today, the space is extremely concrete. We have hundreds of billions on-chain. Institutions from all over the world are getting on-chain. Some of them have already tokenized equities, and some of them are tokenizing treasuries.

Crypto went from being a fairy tale, an idea, to being something that every institution around the world knows about and having very concrete use cases, which I would argue have changed the way people do things today. Stablecoins have changed the lives of billions of people. Go to any country in Asia or South America. Their lives have been turned upside down since stablecoins have been around. They finally have a way to escape inflation and escape governments taking their money from one day to the next.

If you look at stories like Lebanon, for instance, they had a complete currency collapse, right? The banks froze everyone's money, basically. If you wanted to survive in Lebanon without stablecoins today, it would not be possible. Probably 90% of folks today use stablecoins.

If you look at things like prediction markets, prediction markets have literally removed the monopoly that a lot of news media had on people's opinions. Now, instead of believing someone, I can just believe the market on what's actually going to happen about any topic in the world. Crypto is a technology, a space, and an industry that has redefined the view anyone has around the world about inflation.

If you ask anyone about inflation 10 years ago, they'll tell you, “What are you talking about? What is inflation?” Now everyone knows about it. Why? Because of Bitcoin. I think this is an industry that has had such a huge impact around the world in so few years.

3. CCIP and lessons from LayerZero-rsETH exploit

Keep in mind, we're in a world where everyone expects results very fast. “I need this today. I need this fast.” This is very new in the history of the world. Usually, you don't have a technology that changes the way everything works in 10 years. That's what crypto and blockchain have done.

I think this space has had a major impact. It's changed many people's lives around the world, and I think the next 50 years are going to keep seeing these changes. They're really going to bring this technology to maturity, where most things you do in your life will be powered by blockchain.

I've seen a similar evolution. I got into the space in 2017, and I saw it more as a dreamer phase, a tinkerer phase, where all these ideas were being thrown out about what we could build on-chain. But really, all that was working was basically a store of value and a medium of exchange, like Bitcoin, Ether, and a few other tokens at the time.

Then DeFi proved itself in 2019, 2020, and 2021. As the markets unraveled, stablecoins became a staple of the on-chain economy, and that was ultimately scaling to hundreds of billions. I think people sort of missed how exponential that growth was.

Now, this next phase, which we've been enamored with in terms of covering it here on the podcast lately, is what you would refer to as tokenization, or what some would call RWAs. We've been aligning around the thesis that we'll probably see the tokenized assets that come on-chain flip the total market cap of crypto-native assets.

4. Every institution wants to migrate its business logic onchain

This is at the core of everything that I think Chainlink is clearly focused on right now. What else are you seeing in terms of that shift happening around tokenization and RWAs in DeFi?

There are a few things that happened in the last 3 years. It's been repeated, but I'll say it again: 3 years ago, we were coming off the FTX collapse. We were coming off the Luna collapse and the huge number of collapses we had back in the day.

By the way, we're in a kind of mood today where everyone is dooming about the space. Think back to 2022 if you want to get your spirits up, because that was way worse. That was way worse. The world was literally collapsing.

Right now, every single institution around the world has a team focused on blockchain. They have digital asset teams. Some of these digital asset teams, by the way, report directly to the business units responsible for bottom-line profit and ROI. It's not the innovation department. It's literally the people who make money for the bank who are in charge of the blockchain strategy.

We've matured a ton. The conversations I'm having with institutions today are around, “How do I take the business logic I have off-chain and make it compatible with my on-chain integration?” Basically, “How do I start migrating the business logic from off-chain to on-chain?”

That’s where Chainlink plays a unique part. Chainlink was built around a very crucial idea: there will need to be a transition period between offchain and onchain. This transition period, by the way, for some systems will take decades; it will take centuries. Maybe we won’t be around anymore when it is completed. So you really need a way to orchestrate offchain systems to onchain systems.

That’s what Chainlink has been working on for the last 7 years. The way we started was with data, right? Back then, we were orchestrating prices from offchain to onchain. The data we brought to the blockchains basically built DeFi. If you look at DeFi today, from Aave to Morpho to Compound, it’s all running on Chainlink data, basically.

But this was just the start. This was just what people and developers needed at the time for the space to grow. Today, the data we’re bringing is business logic data for banks, compliance data, identity data. It’s all these key things you need for this shift from offchain to onchain to actually happen.

Johann, I want to get more into that orchestration idea in a bit and talk more specifically about Chainlink, but I want to linger on this institutional movement again. We ask lots of guests this: Why, or what’s making, these teams want to bring, like you said, their business logic onchain?

For you, from what you see, what’s your interpretation of the why? What is the need for them to actually want to move onchain? Because to me, that gets at the whole point of all this and why there’s more excitement in the future, if there’s a clear need that these institutions feel they have to be onchain now. So, what is actually pulling them over?

I think the issue is that many people assume TradFi is running on technology that’s from 5 or 10 years ago. It’s very wrong. A lot of TradFi is running on technologies that have been running for 50 or 60 years, using COBOL, et cetera.

One key thing is that they’re seeing blockchain as a technology that can make their processes 10x more efficient, and it’s actually worth it for them to do it. You have to keep in mind, this system secures the whole world. The reason you and I are able to speak right now and I’m able to go buy a coffee at a local shop is because these systems are running. If you take down the systems, nothing works, right?

So, for these folks to update their systems, they need to see a 10x or 50x improvement in efficiency. That’s what blockchain is bringing. If you look at some key projects we’ve done, for instance, we’ve worked with DTCC in the past to release something called Smart NAV.

What is Smart NAV? Smart NAV is a way for fund managers and institutions to agree on the price of a specific fund at any point in time onchain. Basically, the chain becomes a source of truth. This sounds simple, right? Why is it an improvement? Because the way these folks were doing it for 50 years was sending around spreadsheets by email. Probably, at the time, it was by fax machine. They were agreeing on the specific price of a fund in a completely asynchronous, super-inefficient way.

Blockchain is able to solve this type of issue. We’re working on collateral management with DTCC to be able to do something that’s also revolutionary for them, where now you don’t need to have conversations offchain to be able to get to the source of truth on everything between multiple actors. The chain is the arbiter. It’s a source of truth, right?

I think the one key thing it’s solving right now is agreeing on the state of something from multiple parties onchain instead of doing it one by one, peer to peer, et cetera. You do it on the blockchain, which, by the way, this coordination mechanism is what makes blockchain a killer use case.

The reason blockchain is so great is because it’s a coordination mechanism across hundreds, hundreds of thousands, billions of people that everyone can trust. That’s the first use case.

The second use case that I think is very interesting is that the markets we have today are built for an extremely different world than the world we had 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, geopolitically and even macroeconomically, the money was all in Europe and the U.S. It’s different today. If you look at the U.S. stock market, around 20% of investors in the U.S. stock market are outside the U.S. They’re in Asia, in Singapore, wherever.

What does this mean? You want a market that’s running 24/7. You want something that’s adapted for a global audience, not a local audience. That’s why Hyperliquid is doing so well, by the way.

I think blockchain can be seen as a way to get people from the 20th century to the 21st century, from a very unipolar world, I would say, where the money is concentrated in very, very specific areas, to a way more multipolar world, where you need to coordinate across multiple time zones and you need to go through multiple countries to be able to get the biggest distribution possible for your markets.

Nothing can do what blockchain is doing in these 2 categories. There is no other system that can do the same thing. So, I think those are the 2 key reasons I’m seeing this interest.

I’d add the last point. It’s very funny that institutions are now the biggest proponents of crypto and blockchains, and if you go on Crypto Twitter, et cetera, a lot of people are just going into AI today or other things.

I think what has happened is our industry went through 2 different phases. The first phase was a dreaming phase, where everything is new, it’s romanticized, it’s amazing. I miss those days too, by the way. Don’t get me wrong. I miss the hackathons. I miss meeting builders. I miss all this dreaming phase, right?

We’re not in the dreaming phase anymore. We’re in the big-boy phase. Stuff is actually happening. Your crowd is not the hacker who’s been at a hackathon for 48 hours and hasn’t slept and is just powered by Red Bull. Your crowd is institutional.

5. Security means everything for adoption of DeFi

Frankly, it’s a different crowd. It’s a big shift—believe me, for me too, right? But that’s a shift we have to take if you want to go from dreaming to actually building stuff and changing the world. So, yeah, that would be my view on this whole current state of affairs.

Yeah, so well said, man. I feel like we’re sort of exemplifying this change with 3 collared shirts on this podcast. A year ago, that would not be the case. It was either a hoodie or a T-shirt, but we’re feeling it too.

I want to get back to this. We’re talking a bit about taking this 50-year-old system. You’re talking about COBOL. I know TradFi has a lot of T+2 settlement, or even longer, and it’s not instantly, atomically composable.

So, with this new world, this blockchain world, all this composability introduces complexity. I think we’re pushing the limits of coordination sometimes. One of my worries about institutional adoption has been whether they’re going to be worried about the security of these systems.

Recently, we’ve had some very public incidents come up, and whenever these happen, I feel like the industry can take a step back. But I’m specifically talking about this LayerZero Kelp incident, I guess. What are some of the biggest lessons we should take away from that incident? Is there anything you want to talk about specifically about what you saw go on there?

I know it looked like, in the aftermath, Chainlink was basically a big recipient of a lot of new business coming out of that. Why don’t you shed some light on that whole situation?

Yes. Where do I even start here? Security for our space is a must-have. It’s something you can’t go without. It’s something you need to be extremely, extremely paranoid about. Frankly, this is not a joke.

Security is the only thing that can take everything I’ve been discussing throughout the podcast, and if we’re not secure, and if we don’t have a secure space, let’s not bother. Let’s stay where we are. Let’s forget about blockchain, let’s forget about crypto, let’s go do something else. Let’s work in AI, let’s cook pizza, whatever you want to do with your life. If you’re not going to be focused on security in this space, there is no point.

There is 1 key reason for that: blockchain is meant to be a coordination tool between multiple parties. How can you coordinate if you can’t agree on the truth? That’s a very simple way to think about it.

With blockchain, frankly, if you have a mistake, you can never go back in time. If money is stolen, you can’t do anything about it. It’s already too late. It’s a deterministic system. Whatever input you put in, you have an output, right?

This is very different from TradFi. In TradFi, if money is stolen, you always have recourse. The bank can freeze your money. You can do tons of things to get back the assets, right?

In crypto, except if you’re using some stablecoins with freezing capabilities, Bitcoin has no freeze function. Ethereum has no freeze function. Most liquid-staking solutions have no freezing functions. Frankly, even if they had, the money would already be gone before you could even freeze the asset.

Crypto and security are the same. When I hear crypto, I hear security. You cannot build in this space if you don’t have this in mind.

Now, what did the hack showcase? I think the first thing to take into account in this hack is that no one is able to agree on who was at fault. Someone is blaming one actor, someone is blaming another actor, someone is blaming another. That’s already 1 key issue, right? Who was at fault? I’m asking you, right? It’s a big issue.

From our standpoint, the way we think of infrastructure, if you’re going to do anything with infrastructure in this space, you need an infrastructure provider that’s doing security end to end. In our case, for instance, Chainlink data feeds are secure by default. CCIP is secure by default.

It’s not on the user to configure God knows what. It’s not on the DeFi protocol to say, “This user hasn’t done the checks, and they’re not set up properly. I shouldn’t accept their use case.” There is 1 party, 1 network—the Chainlink network—with its node operators, its economic model, and everything we’ve built over the last 7 years that’s responsible for the security.

Very much like Ethereum: if Ethereum were to have an issue, a double-spend attack, et cetera, the folks doing the security are the Ethereum nodes.

You can point to who is in charge of the security. Here's the biggest problem that was showcased: you had no network in charge of the security. You had 3, 4, 5 different parties responsible for coordinating.

That's impossible to scale because, guess what? We're trying to build a fully composable world: every single asset interacting with every single protocol with every single chain. How are you going to handle this level of complexity if, in addition to having all of these assets, all of these risks, and all of these economic risks, you're now adding infrastructure risk on top?

This modular approach is completely antithetical to everything we've done in terms of infrastructure in this space since this space was born. If you're using infrastructure, it should be secure by default. It shouldn't be on the protocol or the asset issuer to configure it. That's my view, and I think it's a live-or-die view.

I really don't think this space can exist if we keep having these failures, if we keep embracing this type of architecture and thinking. It's bad thinking. It doesn't scale. It doesn't work.

I'm not the one saying it. I'm obviously biased; I spent my last 7 years trying to make this space secure with the right architecture. It's the market saying it. DeFi has not been the same since this whole issue happened. We lost $300 million in value.

My call to action to people is: stop and think a little. If you want this space to succeed, really think about how this type of security model will scale. If you want to onboard trillions of dollars, I guarantee you, if you think a little and reason about security, you will change the way you're building things very quickly.

So, with everything you've learned in the aftermath of what happened here with LayerZero and the rsETH—call it an exploit—what lessons have you taken forward with CCIP? If I'm a team trying to decide how my token is going to move between Ethereum and some L2s, or Ethereum and other L1s, and I'm considering CCIP, what moves the needle and ultimately gets them on board, especially in the wake of all the fear and uncertainty following what happened there with LayerZero?

That's a great question. Look, the thing I love about this space is that anyone, anywhere, whether they have $1 million in the bank or no money, can build something. That's really the beauty of the space. Uniswap was a hackathon project that's currently securing billions of dollars. You have so many success stories of people who had nothing and built something.

To me, when these people are using a system, it's very important that they know the system is secure for them. They're not liable for configuring the security of the system. Because, guess what? If I'm a developer working by myself and I have very few resources to build a vision that could change the whole world, I don't want to worry about infrastructure security. I want to be able to get going, focus on my use case, and focus on that only.

The thing that changes everything is that people can actually realize: do I want to build a financial application, or do I want to build a bridge? The folks who don't want to build a bridge go and use Chainlink CCIP. Why? Because Chainlink CCIP is secure by default.

It has a lot of node operators who have been running infrastructure for 10, 15, or 20 years. Some of those are folks like P2P.org, one of the biggest Lido validators. Some of those are Vodafone. It's a very diversified set of operators, very similar to what you would expect from a blockchain in terms of node diversity and distribution across multiple geographic locations.

Basically, it's something people spent a lot of time and resources ensuring was safe and could be used by default. Most folks in this space just want to use something that's secure by default, and they don't want to have to rely on security. Imagine where Ethereum would be today if everyone who had to build on Ethereum also had to configure the security of Ethereum. It sounds insane to us, right? That's the same thing that was being proposed to these cross-chain developers.

We go to these developers and tell them, "Look, you don't have to worry about who these node operators are, how they handle their private-key configuration, which cloud providers they run on, whether they run on bare metal or in the cloud, or how many providers they have. It's all done already for you. Oh, and by the way, if you want to run your own attestation to ensure CCIP, to ensure you have a say also in the cross-chain transaction, you can do it."

We basically create something that's secure by default, and users can add their own verifications on top of it. That's defense in depth. It's something that's secure by default, and then you just add security on top.

That's completely different from the value proposition being offered by the other folks in this case, where the minimum security used to be 1 out of 1. I think it's like 2 out of 2 now, which, by the way, is a very low number for blockchain. Just saying.

Then you figure it out yourself. If you're a project, you have 1 out of 1—just add more nodes. If you mess up, it's on you. Good luck. We're just standards; we're neutral. We don't touch whatever you're doing. You're free to do it yourself.

I do want to add something because I care about this space, and I think this space is truly beautiful, where anyone in the world can build something and change the lives of billions of people. If we had applied the architecture that was being proposed to folks like Kelp, this space would not be what it is today.

Then it would just be startups—VC-funded startups that have $50 million in the bank—who can build stuff. It would be a very sad space. It wouldn't have the spark of innovation that we got because people could use security systems that are secure by default and spend all their resources building out their own applications.

Those are my views on the difference. That's what the market tells us every day. Frankly, you've seen $4 billion migrate onto CCIP. Spoiler alert: that's just the start, because I think everyone realized that we need a better architecture for this type of system.

6. Prediction markets and Chainlink's role

Yeah, man. So well said. I want to switch gears here a little bit, though. We both mentioned prediction markets in the earlier phase of this podcast, and, to be honest, I really don't know what Chainlink is doing in this space. But I think we can all agree that prediction markets have become fascinating for just becoming better predictors of events.

I think we're going to see these rolled into more financial primitives. I think they're going to go even more mainstream and be packaged. I'm curious how Chainlink is thinking about prediction markets. As somebody who sits in the middle of resolving this stuff, I'm sure you have a view, but, again, I've been somewhat ignorant about what you're doing in this space.

Well, for Polymarket, we're a resolution mechanism for up-and-down markets in crypto. They have crypto markets, and they're expanding to equities and commodities. Just so you know, these markets are probably some of the highest-volume markets that Polymarket has.

We've been the resolution mechanism for around 6 months, and that's been a huge success. More recently, we announced that we're the official oracle and resolution mechanism for the official prediction market for the FIFA World Cup. We're basically using Chainlink oracles to resolve the results of matches, etc.

Look, prediction markets are one of the big use cases for which Chainlink was built. It's basically about being an arbiter of truth: what actually happened, what took place, and being able to resolve markets based on that input. An easy way to think of it is that prediction markets cannot exist if you don't know what has happened, and Chainlink has been building the infrastructure to say, "Okay, that's what happened," for the last 7 years, literally.

So yeah, we just had a big week last week. I think we had around 7 prediction-market use cases announced with 7 different prediction markets—6 or 7, something like that. FIFA was one of them. We had some Polymarket stuff. So, it's a big focus for us, and a lot of the market is moving to this type of resolution through decentralized oracles.

7. Are AI agents the next wave of new users?

With all of the themes we've covered here—stablecoins, RWA/tokenization, prediction markets—we're still living in a world where the user is us. It's humans: your average retail investor to more serious, big capital allocators. But I still buy into the idea that we could see a world where there are more AI agents transacting on-chain. Maybe they're transacting on behalf of us. Maybe some of them, again, are just transacting totally independently.

But either way, all of the work to onboard users kind of seems silly to me if, ultimately, AI agents are able to continue to multiply and grow. It seems like there's less of a cost to onboarding them. So I'm wondering: Is this user group real? Is this actually growing, or is this just some narrative that we've been fed in the crypto Twitter sphere?

Yeah. I mean, there is a ton of hype. There is a lot of truth also. So it's all about distilling what's real and what's not, frankly. Look, we have a lot of use cases we're thinking about with AI agents. A core one is: How do you make their actions actually verifiable and transparent?

So I ask you a question, right? Would you give your money to an AI agent who's showing you zero transparency on how they're allocating their money? What's their thought process before doing it? Probably not, right? I wouldn't give a friend $5 if he's not going to tell me how he's going to spend it. I'm surely not going to give an AI agent my money if they're not going to be transparent with me.

So I think this whole transparency thing is a key use case we've been focused on, and that requires Chainlink. We will probably divulge some more information there. But the way I view transparency for AI agents is critical—critical—and that's a key use case we've been working on. Again, we'll have more information there.

One key thing to keep in mind with AI, and why AI is not appropriate for allocating money today, is that AI likes to—AI is a big liar. That's really the truth. When AI doesn't know something, it doesn't tell you it doesn't know it. So that's all good if you're asking it what's the best way to go to the closest pizza shop next to me. It's not cool if you're giving it $1 million and asking it how to allocate.

There was a study I looked up about some new AI model where basically 50% of what they were doing, they didn't know the answer, but they can't say they don't know. AI can never say they don't know, because imagine the UX for the user. If you're prompting the AI and half the time it's telling you, “I don't know,” you're going to stop prompting the AI, right? So that's a decision that many AI companies have made. The AI knows everything even when it doesn't.

There is a word for that. It's called the yes-man. And guess what? Yes-men, you know, they're not people you give your money to do very key things.

So I think AI agents are promising. I think a lot of transactions will be done through AI agents in the future. I think there are key transparency issues to resolve: What thought process goes into an AI agent? That's something we're working on. I think there are other issues specific to the AI industry: What is the use case they want to focus on? Do they want a yes-man, or do they want someone who can become a capital allocator? These are 2 very different design mechanisms which, currently, from my point of view, we don't have a good solution for.

Yeah, I think you're spot-on with the trust part. I know I'm wired to want to see under the hood. I want to see open-source ideas about how you're managing my money, little AI agent. But on the other flip side, it's kind of crazy how comfortable people do get with black boxes.

For example, I don't know why I always go back to this, but autonomous-driving cars—right now, Tesla's rolling out what I think is called Full Self-Driving, or FSD, and it's not open source. You can't see how this car is driving your family around and making decisions that actually impact whether you live or die. And people have become okay with that.

I don't know if that's a different sort of analogy, but it is funny, the comfort that people do get with black boxes. They literally put their lives inside of it and drive 100 miles an hour on the freeway, and you don't know how it works. You hope you're trusting a guy, a corporation, not to smash into a wall or drive off into a ravine. So I think it's possible we just get there even without full transparency. I hope we push for transparency.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree. These are 2 completely antithetical philosophies. So we basically created Bitcoin because we didn't want opaque money. Now we're going to trust a self-driving car that can kill us. Priority-wise, actually, I would work on the second one rather than the first. I would rather have bad money than be able to get killed by my own car, right?

8. What DeFi and TradFi misunderstand about each other

Totally. Yeah. It's like first-principles thinking: I can't even spend the money if I'm dying in this car. So yeah, exactly. I don't care about the money if the thing is going to kill me, right?

Okay. I want to go back to something that I've been thinking about during this pod. Johann, you've had a lot of experience, I think, in the DeFi world now and in this institutional world. And I'm curious: Is there something that both sides sort of get wrong about each other?

That's a very good question. First off, I think these 2 worlds are colliding more and more. They're now talking to each other, which is a big improvement from what we had even 2 years ago, right? What can they get wrong about each other? Frankly, a lot of the stuff they think about each other is spot-on.

I think the crypto folks see the TradFi folks as being slower. That's true. But they're also, from my point of view, when they go, they go, right? So they might go slower, but when they actually go, it has a huge impact on the whole world. The TradFi folks see the DeFi folks as being fast and innovating quickly. Also very true. So I think most of their opinions are actually correct.

What I think the DeFi world might be underestimating is how serious the TradFi folks are about blockchain today. They're very serious, and I think the impact of TradFi getting on-chain keeps being either underplayed or at least completely underrecognized by our industry today, right? So I think, frankly, it's more on our side.

It's kind of like crypto has been in this desert in 2017, where we were just looking for ideas and looking for use cases, and then we saw this oasis from afar. This oasis was tokenization, right? And so we walked, we walked, we walked throughout all these years, and it was very hard, and we were very thirsty, and it was very challenging, but we're finally there.

We're finally at the oasis. The oasis is being TradFi, and we can drink, but we're not drinking for some reason. We're not taking the sweet aroma that TradFi can bring to our industry because we're in disbelief, right? I think that's really the place we're in. I know it's a weird analogy, but it does play out well in my head when I picture it. I think that's really where we are.

9. The most bullish factor for Chainlink

I wouldn't underrepresent how big of a shift we're going to see in the coming 1 to 2 years. The way to view it is we've been in the dreaming phase, we're in the maturity phase. The third phase is, “Let's take over the world.” That's basically the phase we're at today. And I think that's where most of our space is getting it wrong still.

Johann, just getting back to Chainlink a bit itself. This question was actually passed to me from a community member. What's 1 thing that makes you really bullish on Chainlink that you think the market still doesn't fully understand right now?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. Look, the way to think of Chainlink in very high-level terms, right? We can go into technicals and what we build: orchestration, cross-chain, and data. The way to think of Chainlink today is that Chainlink powers the world of crypto.

From DeFi to prediction markets, to cross-chain between chains, to tokenization, literally every use case you can think of is powered in 1 way or another by Chainlink. So, are you bullish on electricity? Are you bullish on energy? That's basically what we are. We're literally the electricity of the whole space.

If you don't have electricity, the lights go out and you don't have internet, et cetera. If you don't have Chainlink, you don't have DeFi, you don't have cross-chain, you don't have tokenization even, right? So that's why you should be bullish on Chainlink. And frankly, if you're bullish on the space, you should be bullish on what we're building here.

I am bullish. I've been at this place for 7 years, and I'm looking forward to being there for many, many years to come because I think what we're doing within the space is world-changing. I think we're going to change the way the world works, and we're going to have a positive impact in ways no other technology has had in hundreds of years.

And I also think the impact we're bringing to the world is bigger than anything else, including AI. So because of that, I'm bullish on Chainlink, because this whole dream, this whole vision we're powering and we're building is running on Chainlink today.

10. What needs to happen for DeFi to replace TradFi legacy markets?

You literally have more use cases built on Chainlink and more projects running on Chainlink than you have on even Ethereum. We're broader than every blockchain, because it doesn't matter where the application or the tokenization is taking place: it's going to run on Chainlink. It can run on Solana, Ethereum, whichever chain—even on a private blockchain, even on Canton. Wherever it's going to be, it's going to be powered by Chainlink, and because of that, I'm excited about our future.

In order for that future to be fully realized, what do you think still needs to happen for onchain finance to become the actual global financial system? This is what's so exciting about all the tokenization talks we've had here: we will hopefully see select assets be tokenized, just like stablecoins are the number 1 RWA, and then eventually we'll see all offerings being tokenized by the teams at the forefront of tokenizing their assets.

But at some point, it'll be obvious: Why are we tokenizing certain assets? Why do we still have something in a spreadsheet? Why is there a paper system instead of just doing primary issuance onchain? So, what bottlenecks do you see remaining, and what else needs to happen for us to have this real institutional adoption of onchain finance?

Yeah, that's a very good question. Two things. First, I'm going to talk about security again. We cannot play around with this one. I think we need to keep a security mindset in every single thing we build onchain. Frankly, the way to think about this, for anyone who's been in crypto, is that we've been through so much throughout all of these years. We've been able to grow our space from nothing to what it is today, and this will get slowed down 100% if we keep having security failures.

Crypto is not a startup factory. Crypto is not the San Francisco mentality where you move fast and break things. This is a space where you cannot break things onchain. This doesn't exist. There is no break-things-free pass here. If you're going to build something, you need to be sure about the security. That's the first thing. Nothing happens without this. Crypto doesn't happen without secure systems.

Second, I think in the last year, a lot of people have started—actually, a lot of TradFi folks and institutions have started trading onchain and hedging positions onchain. Hyperliquid is a very good example. I think the SpaceX IPO was traded there. It was traded on centralized exchanges, it was traded with xStocks, and it was traded with Ondo.

About 2 months ago, when the conflict in the Middle East started, where did people go to trade commodities? They went onchain to trade gold, silver, and oil—WTI. I actually think the use cases are here. If you spoke to someone a year ago about trading commodities onchain, they would have laughed in your face. If you tell them about it today, they'll say, “Yeah, sure. I heard the CFTC guy talk about it earlier on TV.” So it's no longer a dream.

And, by the way, this goes back to what I'm saying: we're moving extremely fast. We should be very, very grateful for how fast our industry is moving. I think these key use cases—equity tokenization, stablecoin tokenization, all of these use cases—are going to be the Trojan horse into tokenizing the whole world. Frankly, once you've tokenized commodities and equities and money with stablecoins, there's very little left over, and you can go through the rest fairly quickly.

So I think there are key use cases, and again, these use cases don't really happen without what Chainlink is bringing to the table. If I'm going to tokenize something, I want it to be on every chain in a secure manner. How do I do this with CCIP? If I want to tokenize something, I need to price it. How do I do it? With data. So I think this is really the future for us.

And look, the bright side, just to say again how spoiled we are to be in this space: I'm talking about this future, but the future is here. I'm not dreaming here. It's happening already today. People are trading onchain today—SpaceX, commodities—and it's going to keep increasing in the coming months.

So exciting. We agree that the future is here, and it's interesting to get your perspective, because Chainlink was so ahead of the times when it launched. Most of us didn't understand what the need for an oracle was until it was explained to us through Chainlink.

11. Closing

I remember tracking all of these new products being developed over the years and wondering, “Do they need to do anything else?” Oracles are so huge, but the recognition of interoperability and ultimately what we would all categorize under CCIP is, again, so forward-thinking. I'm really excited to get your perspective on all of this.

I think this is a great place for us to wrap up. Johann, thanks so much for joining us. It's such a pleasure to meet you. Keep up the great work, and I want to give you the final word here before we go.

Yeah, look, for anyone listening to us, it's likely you're into our space. You like crypto, you believe in crypto. All I want to say to these folks is—and I hope this came through in the interview—we're doing something that's worth doing, and crypto is good for humanity.

I think there are many technologies where you could argue, “Are they good for humanity, or are they going to make us worse off?” Social media is one of those. There are many things where you're not sure: Is it good, or is it bad?

I think the main way to look at crypto is: Why was it created? The reason crypto was created was to bring transparency to the world, starting with the money supply. Frankly, now with the rise of AI and the rise of so many new technologies, the transparency topic has never been so important.

So I think if you're in this space, you should not only be bullish on the progress you've made in the last 10 years, but you should be extremely, extremely proud of the vision this space has been working towards for the last 7 to 8 years. What we're doing here today is worth doing.