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- Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov described DeFi as a hub for financial innovation, particularly in creating and testing risk-return models.
- He anticipates the total value locked (TVL) in RWAs to surpass traditional cryptocurrencies, driven by stablecoins, tokenized commodities, and other tokenized financial instruments.
At Ondo Finance’s Ondo Summit 2025, Chainlink co-founder and CEO Sergey Nazarov highlighted two significant but underappreciated truths about decentralized finance (DeFi), traditional finance (TradFi), and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Nazarov emphasized that the relationship between DeFi and TradFi is more intertwined than most realize and that RWAs will fundamentally change how the blockchain industry is perceived.
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Chainlink CEO Says DeFi & TradFi Are Each Other’s Biggest Customers
According to Nazarov, the largest source of capital for DeFi will come from TradFi institutions. “The TradFi community has a lot of the capital that is yet to flow into the industry,” he stated. He pointed out that while the crypto sector has reached a market size of $3.5 trillion, it will need much more to expand further, saying:
“Let’s say we go to seven or ten [trillion dollars]. Okay, great. We’re at seven or ten, like, hooray for us. Where’s the rest? [..] Guess where it is. It’s where it’s always been—with the asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, and banks.”
Nazarov argued that despite this reality, many still fail to see TradFi as DeFi’s most important customer. He stressed the importance of building infrastructure that allows both sectors to work together. “We have to make the bridge connections. We have to make compliant transactions possible. We have to interoperate,” he said.
He also described DeFi as a breeding ground for financial innovation, particularly in risk-return models.
“Where do you see the fastest rate of innovation?” he asked. The Chainlink CEO added, “Is it in regulated institutions where everyone has to get a sign-up from three people to borrow a paperclip? No. It’s in the places where people can just ship a piece of code globally and test whether liquidity is interested in that risk-return proposition very quickly.”
Tokenized RWAs Will Redefine Blockchain’s Public Perception
Nazarov also predicted that tokenized RWAs will shift the way the general public views the blockchain industry, as reported in our previous story. Currently, many associate crypto with speculative assets like meme coins and NFTs, but he expects this to change as blockchain adoption grows in traditional markets. “The real-world asset trend will reformat the public understanding of our industry,” the Chainlink CEO stated.
He believes the total value locked (TVL) in tokenized RWAs will surpass that of traditional cryptocurrencies. “If you add up all the money that’s going to flow into stablecoins, commodity coins, tokenized funds, and a number of other tokenized things, the universe of that value is, in my opinion, larger than the universe of speculative demand for meme coins and NFTs and cryptocurrencies,” he explained.
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Comparing blockchain’s current phase to the early days of the internet, he noted that early perceptions were limited in scope. “You had a point in the internet when it was about email or something. What’s the internet? The internet’s this thing that’s going to kill the U.S. Postal Service. And that’s not what the internet is,” he said. The Chainlink CEO added, “The internet is information technology, which is all information, not just the U.S. Postal Service’s piece of information.”
