At the end of year 2021, Chainlink’s Co-founder Sergey Nazarov joined Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino to discuss Chainlink’s rapidly expanding network of major enterprise node operators and decentralized services, including their Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) – Chainlink’s blockchain messaging and communications standard for enabling cross-chain smart contracts.
Enterprise Adoption
In 2021, Chainlink Labs announced that several leading enterprises – including Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, the Associated Press, and AccuWeather – all launched their own Chainlink nodes. Nazarov said he attributes enterprise participation in the Chainlink network to both the overwhelming growth of the smart contract economy and the accessibility to decentralized markets which Chainlink provides.
“All of these companies – Swisscom, Deutsche Telekom, Associated Press, AccuWeather – all of them have done very significant analysis on the smart contract economy and the market for either their data or their computational capabilities,” Nazarov said. “It’s a rapidly growing market – growing from below $1 trillion to well over $2 trillion in a very small time period.”
He explained Chainlink’s utility as an “extremely efficient” way for enterprises to plug their existing data and infrastructure into these markets. High-quality on-chain data is fundamental to building more advanced hybrid and cross-chain smart contracts across verticals like dynamic NFTs, decentralized insurance, and decentralized finance (DeFi) – the majority of which is already secured by Chainlink.
The Future Of CCIP
“CCIP seeks to do what TCP/IP did for the internet,” Nazarov explained. He described the current blockchain economy as comprising many isolated chains with siloed smart contract capabilities. “They’re not currently communicating,” he said. “They’re not currently being combined into more and more advanced smart contracts.”
By enabling different chains to communicate with each other, CCIP allows developers to leverage the capabilities of multiple chains to build a single advanced smart contract application. “CCIP seeks to create that step function increase through connectivity,” Nazarov said.
On The Horizon For 2022
“Chainlink’s role is going to be to provide hundreds and thousands of these decentralized oracle networks and decentralized services to these various verticals,” Nazarov explained. In 2022, he expects more high-quality node operators to publish their data on-chain via the Chainlink network, providing the necessary infrastructure for a new tier of smart contract applications.
“I think we’re at an inflection point that kicked off this year and is going to really continue into next year,” he said. “Chainlink’s goal is going to be to serve all of the needs of these more and more advanced applications, and to enable them to be successful, so that the smart contract economy market grows and that virtuous cycle continues.”
Watch Sergey Nazarov’s full conversation with Jill Malandrino on Nasdaq TradeTalks.
