Speaker 1: Hey, folks, we are recording at chain link smart Con
Speaker 1: event and joining me is Zach Ryans, who is the
Speaker 1: community liaison at chain Link also known as chain link God.
Speaker 1: How are you, Zach.
Speaker 2: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got to I had to call out your
Speaker 1: ex handle because a lot of people know you as
Speaker 1: chain link God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the former frog on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Zach. How did you find your way into crypto?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. I think different people have
Speaker 2: their different roots into crypto based on, like, you know,
Speaker 2: where their background was. I initially got into crypto. I
Speaker 2: saw online that you could run a program on your
Speaker 2: computer that prints money, and I thought, whoa, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I gotta go figure out what that is. And I
Speaker 2: kind of fell down the rabbit hole from like the
Speaker 2: GPU mining hobbyist type perspective. So I jumped into bitcoin,
Speaker 2: you know, tried to understand why does digital money have value?
Speaker 2: And then I looked into like, you know, the coin
Speaker 2: market cap list, and I saw that every token was
Speaker 2: on ethereum. So I'm like, okay, what's interesting about ethereum?
Speaker 2: And I learned about smart contracts, and then I saw
Speaker 2: that smart contracts weren't really all that smart they didn't
Speaker 2: know anything about the real world. So if you were
Speaker 2: going to have some kind of like mortgage on chain,
Speaker 2: how does that contract know anything about the house. So
Speaker 2: I kind of had this conception of what the oracle
Speaker 2: problem was before I really knew to put a name
Speaker 2: with it. And then I eventually came across this paper
Speaker 2: that someone wrote about like one institutional smart contract would require,
Speaker 2: and it was basically saying like, hey, chain link is
Speaker 2: like this the infrastructure that's going to make smart contracts
Speaker 2: actually useful at scale. Look at all their connections, look
Speaker 2: at at the bread the team's background. And from there,
Speaker 2: like when I got fully like Link pilled is when
Speaker 2: I got like fully Crypto pilled, I'm like, okay, this
Speaker 2: is like this is going to be passive, this is
Speaker 2: going to be huge. I have to, you know, try
Speaker 2: and educate the world the best I'm able to. And
Speaker 2: that's how it kind of led to my Twitter account
Speaker 2: and me educating and debating and arguing with people on Twitter.
Speaker 2: But and it's just kind of snowballed from there, and
Speaker 2: so now it's like Crypto's absorbed my life.
Speaker 1: At this point, for sure, you're all in on crypto
Speaker 1: uh oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Like mentally, we were talking.
Speaker 1: Right before the recording about the massive adoption chain link
Speaker 1: is getting in and what a landmark moment we're seeing
Speaker 1: with Swift and DTCC and c CIP and how these
Speaker 1: institutions and banks are now looking to leverage chain link.
Speaker 1: What what are your thoughts on that adoption?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I think it's been fascinating because you know,
Speaker 2: very early days chain links product market fit was DeFi
Speaker 2: through price feeds, so that enabled the launch of things
Speaker 2: like ave and and and you know, different apps of
Speaker 2: use chainlink over time to create secure on chain markets.
Speaker 2: But DeFi historically has been very insular or circular, and
Speaker 2: that you know, it's crypto applications for crypto natives to
Speaker 2: leverage and borrow and trade cryptocurrencies, and you know, the
Speaker 2: vision of chain link, I think has always been trying
Speaker 2: to bridge the traditional off chain world with the on
Speaker 2: chain world. And originally that context was like price data,
Speaker 2: you know, bring price data onto the blockchain so that
Speaker 2: you can enable lending applications and derivatives and these cool
Speaker 2: use cases. But I think the end goal was always
Speaker 2: to and unlock the ability for traditional institutions to issue
Speaker 2: their assets on chain and be able to use it
Speaker 2: within the same DeFi style lending derivatives, trading applications. So
Speaker 2: you know, in the early days Chainlink, there was like
Speaker 2: you know, some preliminary work with with Swift and some
Speaker 2: you know the institutions, but it was a very early stage.
Speaker 2: But now, you know, at this smart con and over
Speaker 2: the past few weeks and months, we've been seeing you know,
Speaker 2: institution after institutions saying, hey, we're going to use chain
Speaker 2: link for digitalizedet transfer agency, or we're going to use
Speaker 2: it for market data, or we're going to do it
Speaker 2: for introperability and orchestration. So like chain link itself has
Speaker 2: evolved beyond price feeds to becoming this full developer platform,
Speaker 2: right and more and more institutions are starting to realize,
Speaker 2: you know, they may not know how to integrate with
Speaker 2: each blockchain individually, but they can come to chain link
Speaker 2: and get all of the productivity to all the blockchains
Speaker 2: and create like truly institutional smart contract use cases. And
Speaker 2: so I think the the institutions are starting to really
Speaker 2: realize if they want to get into the space, they
Speaker 2: need something like chain Link.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's amazing. You know, I was thinking about chain
Speaker 1: link and how you have crypto native companies, you have
Speaker 1: other blockchain projects they're using chain links features plus trad
Speaker 1: fi and you mentioned the orchestrator, right, and it's like
Speaker 1: I just thought of like a spider rab like everybody's
Speaker 1: plugging into this network and chain links allowing everybody to connect.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think people like historically their conception of an
Speaker 2: oracle and chain link was like, oh, it's just data.
Speaker 2: So it's like a sidecar, you know, connected to a
Speaker 2: blockchain and just pushes in data. And so people kind
Speaker 2: of I think there's this perception that like it doesn't
Speaker 2: really play a big role. But to your point, chanlik
Speaker 2: is like a facilitator or like a Connector's like, you
Speaker 2: have this traditional finance economy and then you have this
Speaker 2: on chain ecosystem of builders and devs, and Chanlick's just
Speaker 2: the conduit that's connecting those two by providing the infrastructure
Speaker 2: that spans all the blockchains and all the existing systems
Speaker 2: so that you know, builders can create applications, institutions can
Speaker 2: tokenize and issue assets, and then they can seamlessly interrupt
Speaker 2: through through the infrastructure that chainlinks providing. So it's really
Speaker 2: just about creating this cirguy calls it like a global
Speaker 2: internet of contracts, but like this inparable ecosystem where DeFi
Speaker 2: and tradfi just become finance at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, And we're seeing this incredible convergence of
Speaker 1: trad FI and DeFi in the crypto world, and eventually
Speaker 1: they're going to be so together. It's going to be
Speaker 1: you won't even know the difference necessarily because it's gonna
Speaker 1: be infrastructure is going to be in the piping is
Speaker 1: going to be running behind the scenes, and the end
Speaker 1: user rightfully, so they don't need to know, but it
Speaker 1: just that it works, right yeah.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people they interact with blockchains directly,
Speaker 2: or like crypto natives interact with blockchains directly. But I
Speaker 2: think retail users, they retail users aren't going to know
Speaker 2: what blockchain they're using at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: right just that in the same way that people who
Speaker 2: watch Netflix or Hulu they don't know what cloud service
Speaker 2: any of those applications are running on, and they don't
Speaker 2: really care, right yeah. And so I think chain like
Speaker 2: is always operated behind the scenes where it's going to
Speaker 2: provide this critical piping and critical infrastructure, but the end
Speaker 2: you doesn't ever actually have to know that chain link exists,
Speaker 2: but it enables the applications that end users end up
Speaker 2: interacting with, whether it's payments or you know, new financial
Speaker 2: on chain markets that can be represented through the existing
Speaker 2: applications and brokers's accounts that people already use. So it's
Speaker 2: really just about upgrading the back end system that these
Speaker 2: apps use. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. What are your thoughts on chain link setting up
Speaker 1: the reserve chain link reserve and what's the goal of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I think the reserve is really about driving
Speaker 2: long term sustainability for the chain, the ecosystem. So the
Speaker 2: reserve is this on chain strategic reserve of link tokens
Speaker 2: that on chain and off chain revenue is used to
Speaker 2: convert to link and then stored on chain for you know,
Speaker 2: to support the ecosystem's growth over the long term. So
Speaker 2: I think that the main thing that the reserve kind
Speaker 2: of signals is that as the adoption of the chain
Speaker 2: lik network accelerates and there's more revenue created through off
Speaker 2: chain deals with enterprises or on chain service usage, but
Speaker 2: that value ultimately gets redirected into the link. I think
Speaker 2: there's a lot of projects in crypto where the question
Speaker 2: of what actually accrues value can be a little bit
Speaker 2: confusing or a little bit murky, And yeah, there's different
Speaker 2: intentions from different projects. But I think with chain, like
Speaker 2: you know, the reserve really makes it clear that you know,
Speaker 2: the link token is at the center of the chain
Speaker 2: like ecosystem. Right as the network network effects accelerate, more
Speaker 2: institutions come un chain. There's more builders than all that
Speaker 2: creates this flywhee effect with the link token that just
Speaker 2: accelerates long term growth and sustainability. So I think that
Speaker 2: that that's the main impact that I see with the reserve.
Speaker 1: If I'm not mistaken, chainlink is the only one doing
Speaker 1: that right because I haven't seen any other projects do to.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a model that more projects that
Speaker 1: do you know, in openness and transparency and showing kind
Speaker 1: of the like you said, the crual of value, but
Speaker 1: it's more community focused, right because you have that transparency
Speaker 1: versus it's it's locked up in a foundation, no one
Speaker 1: knows what's happening, that type of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've seen more projects doing these type of like
Speaker 2: buyback model. Hyper Liquid is an interesting case study of
Speaker 2: like you know, their derivatives, exchange volume builds up this
Speaker 2: assistance fund. And I think what's novel about chain Looks
Speaker 2: approach is that it's taking not just the on chain
Speaker 2: revenue that people you know can see on chain through
Speaker 2: stable coin payments or native link payments, but it's also
Speaker 2: the off chain deal revenue. So that's like with with
Speaker 2: different blockchains via the scale program and other initiatives that
Speaker 2: historically projects you don't really see that revenue, and a
Speaker 2: lot of it's like you know, traditional legal agreements. Like
Speaker 2: the example I use is that if a bank or
Speaker 2: enterprise comes to chain link and says like, hey, I
Speaker 2: want to use your Oracle services. I need Oracle networks,
Speaker 2: but for whatever business or legal reasons, I can't touch crypto,
Speaker 2: I can't touch the link token. I can pay in dollars,
Speaker 2: and like, is the chain liok team supposed to say, like, no,
Speaker 2: your money's not good here, go away, Like no, They're
Speaker 2: going to accept that revenue and then use infrastructure to
Speaker 2: convert that into the link token and pag it back
Speaker 2: into the ecosystem, abstracting away that whole process away from
Speaker 2: the institutions. And so I think that this kind of
Speaker 2: a channel calls it payment abstraction. I think this is
Speaker 2: one of the first case studies, or one of the
Speaker 2: first examples that people in crypto are going to be
Speaker 2: able to pay for any service with any form of value,
Speaker 2: and then it's really up to the protocols to determine
Speaker 2: what to do with that value that comes in. So
Speaker 2: in the case of chandlink, that's converting into link and
Speaker 2: putting it into a strategic reserve. I think other ecosystems are
Speaker 2: going to have to consider that. You know, when everyone's
Speaker 2: paying for blockchain transaction fees and stable coins, what does
Speaker 2: that mean for all the gas tokens, Like that's just
Speaker 2: gonna have to be a question that other projects are
Speaker 2: going to have to answer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well, put what are you most excited about
Speaker 1: for a chain link next year? And even the crypto
Speaker 1: market in general, because we've got like the market Structure
Speaker 1: bill coming up and that could have a big impact
Speaker 1: on the industry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the market structurability. If the Clarity Act
Speaker 2: you can get past that year this year, that would
Speaker 2: be fantastic. I think that would create the clarity that
Speaker 2: the industry has been asking for for very very long time.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: At this point, what I'm what I'm personally excited by
Speaker 2: is the one of the products that Chanlink announced here
Speaker 2: it's Marcon, was the Chanlik run Time Environments, which is
Speaker 2: this developer platform where people can come to the chan
Speaker 2: platform right one piece of code, their workflow code, and
Speaker 2: automatically orchest straight an institutional style smart contract that spans
Speaker 2: any on chain system, any off chain system, swift network,
Speaker 2: any external API, and orchestrade a really complex mark contract
Speaker 2: application within the chaining platform itself. So like historically developers
Speaker 2: would come to a blockchain, they would choose a blockchain,
Speaker 2: deploy their application, and then come in and choose their
Speaker 2: oracle as like an after the fact type process. And
Speaker 2: I think where things are moving is that more and
Speaker 2: more developers will first choose their oracle platform, write the
Speaker 2: core logic of their application. That logic will run off
Speaker 2: chain in an oracle network, and then you connect to
Speaker 2: a blockchain for like final settlement and moving tokens around.
Speaker 2: So I think where developers are going to build their
Speaker 2: applications is going to shift from choosing a blockchain to
Speaker 2: choosing an oracle platform that then kind of plugs into
Speaker 2: blockchains after the fact, and you can you can choose
Speaker 2: it in a very modular manner. So I think that
Speaker 2: that's going to open up a whole lot of institutional
Speaker 2: style smart contracts, and then there's a whole lot of
Speaker 2: institutions coming in and choosing chain like and building on
Speaker 2: this runtime environment to kind of show the power of
Speaker 2: it and create these reusable workflow code that can be
Speaker 2: replicated by other people in a similar way that you know,
Speaker 2: EARC and smart contracts have been historically.
Speaker 1: You mentioned institutions. We're seeing just incredible adoption from the
Speaker 1: likes of black Rock and firms of that caliber, plus banks,
Speaker 1: you know, looking to launch stable coins, custody trading, et aps,
Speaker 1: and much more. What are your thoughts on how trad
Speaker 1: fi they are. You know, one point they were against
Speaker 1: this and they were saying, we're going to build our
Speaker 1: own private permission blockchain. Now they recognize public blockchains is
Speaker 1: the way to go. What are your thoughts on how
Speaker 1: they've been coming into the market and building.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's been two complementary but two very
Speaker 2: different routes that they've taken. I think one is the
Speaker 2: trad fi serving crypto audiences, and so that is basically
Speaker 2: all the ETFs being launched, so sure, black Rocks Ibid is,
Speaker 2: you know, the most successful ETF launch ever. B Soul
Speaker 2: was launched just a few i think last week and
Speaker 2: that was like the fastest growing ETF launch of this year.
Speaker 2: So like there's clearly a lot of demand for crypto
Speaker 2: exposure within an ETF type format. So you can you know,
Speaker 2: buy crypto and a brokerage account, and you can have
Speaker 2: a retirement fund. Like there's a lot of benefits. So
Speaker 2: I think TRATFI is realized. You know, there's a whole
Speaker 2: audience people who want to gain exposure to crypto as
Speaker 2: a new asset class, and they already have the legal
Speaker 2: wrappers in the form of an ETF that have become
Speaker 2: very popular over the past ten twenty years. And so
Speaker 2: that's like a new source of revenue for institutions. And
Speaker 2: then there's the other angle, which is institutions starting to
Speaker 2: bring their existing assets on chain and provide that to
Speaker 2: the crypto natives. And so that's like black Rock and
Speaker 2: their build a tokenized money market fund, and Fidelities has
Speaker 2: a money market fund, and the UBS just recently launched
Speaker 2: their tokenized money market fund together with chain Link, using
Speaker 2: the chain platform for subscription and settlement, so you can
Speaker 2: subscribe to a tokenized fund using existing Swift off chain
Speaker 2: fiat payments, so kind of bridging these two worlds. So
Speaker 2: I think the main advantage is there is global distribution
Speaker 2: anyone can access these as it's across the world, and
Speaker 2: the programmability, the collateral mobility where you can deposit these
Speaker 2: assets within DeFi contracts, use them as collateral or stable
Speaker 2: coins against it, and you can move these assets for
Speaker 2: less than a penny in under a second. So just
Speaker 2: the under underlying efficiencies that tokenized assets bring. So it's
Speaker 2: really this two pronged approach of providing access to crypto
Speaker 2: as like a new asset class, as well as using
Speaker 2: the underlying rails of crypto to issue your own assets
Speaker 2: as a complementary approach to the natively issued cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 1: Right, man, it's a brave new world. What all these
Speaker 1: things that are being built and innovated. And I'm curious
Speaker 1: to see what the market is like in twenty thirty,
Speaker 1: not from a price standpoint, but just adoption and seeing
Speaker 1: some of these things running through the economy and the
Speaker 1: markets and people across the globe can access them and
Speaker 1: leverage them like stable coins and tokenized assets. People who
Speaker 1: couldn't access some of these, like stuff on the New
Speaker 1: York Stock Exchange in a tokenized format, can maybe access
Speaker 1: it in countries in Africa, Latin America and much more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think stable coins are like the primary best
Speaker 2: example of that of the ability to transfer a stable
Speaker 2: unit of value between any address anyone in the world
Speaker 2: at any time twenty four to seven for basically nothing
Speaker 2: like that's that is a very liberating thing. I think
Speaker 2: some people in the West, like they don't necessarily realize
Speaker 2: the power of that because like the US has a
Speaker 2: fairly decent financial system when it when it doesn't break.
Speaker 2: But if you're in a country with a uncertain legal
Speaker 2: system or a shaky banking system, you know, getting access
Speaker 2: to a stable currency like the dollar when your local
Speaker 2: feat currency is inflating at ten twenty thirty one hundred
Speaker 2: percent inflation per year, like you want access to dollars,
Speaker 2: but in the traditional system, they either don't offer it,
Speaker 2: or it has like a fake exchange rate, or they
Speaker 2: confiscate or they you know, there's all these like tactics
Speaker 2: that you know that could be done by more authoritarian regimes.
Speaker 2: But if you have a stable coin, nobody can prevent
Speaker 2: you from accessing stable coins, you know, and they're digitally native,
Speaker 2: so they are very easily imported into different countries. So
Speaker 2: I think stable coins will grow in adoption massively. And
Speaker 2: this current US administration is very very pro stable coin,
Speaker 2: both from like the dollarization of other countries as well
Speaker 2: as you know, this is a new purchaser of US treasury,
Speaker 2: so you know, if there's a trillion dollars of stable coins,
Speaker 2: as a trillion dollars of US treasuries within stable coins,
Speaker 2: which is good for funding the despot deficit for the
Speaker 2: US government. So like stable coins are very beneficial, very
Speaker 2: aligned to the US government. It's very beneficial to institutions
Speaker 2: who want to provide new financial products and want to
Speaker 2: undercut the incumbents, and for everyone around the world, it's
Speaker 2: just a way to access a dollar in a more
Speaker 2: superior format. So I think stable coin, in my opinion,
Speaker 2: is like the trojan horse of people starting to understand
Speaker 2: the value proposition of tokenization as a concept and smart
Speaker 2: contracts as a technology. So like, once you experience the
Speaker 2: benefits of a stable coin, you're gonna want that for
Speaker 2: every asset, Like why can't I trade stocks twenty four
Speaker 2: to seven over the weekend. Why does it take you know,
Speaker 2: a week if I want to transfer assets around between
Speaker 2: different accounts, like it should just be instant. So I
Speaker 2: think people will come to expect the benefits of stable
Speaker 2: coins for every type of asset and every financial interaction
Speaker 2: that they have.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they're putting so many things on the blockchain,
Speaker 1: you know, stocks, equities, precious metals, and eventually real estate.
Speaker 1: So maybe I don't know if this is a bit off,
Speaker 1: but eventually individuals can start tokenizing things that are rare,
Speaker 1: of course, and if there's a market for it, you know,
Speaker 1: I have liquidity around it, and I could open up
Speaker 1: a lot of opportunities for people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we've we've historically. What people are kind
Speaker 2: of focused on is like if we can take existing
Speaker 2: assets and tokenize them. But when you have like a
Speaker 2: tokenization toolkit, and you have the global accessibility and the programmability,
Speaker 2: you can create entirely new types of asset classes that
Speaker 2: are kind of hard to imagine, you know, like tokenizing
Speaker 2: someone's time so you can kind of have a new
Speaker 2: way of issuing salaries to people like that. It's hard
Speaker 2: to imagine new use cases in the same way that
Speaker 2: it was hard to imagine all of the possible use
Speaker 2: cases of the Internet in like the early nineties, right,
Speaker 2: Like you can kind of imagine some of the use cases,
Speaker 2: but if you think it email, that was like a
Speaker 2: very simple basic use case, and so think if stiblecoins
Speaker 2: today is very exciting use case of blockchains. But it's
Speaker 2: also like the email use case of blockchains, just moving
Speaker 2: tokens around. So like, when we have this tokenization toolkit,
Speaker 2: there's gonna be a whole new set of assets that
Speaker 2: we can't even imagine today that are going to be
Speaker 2: issued and circulated around the economy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, Zach, great stuff, my friend, and thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining me, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: continue to engage with you on x as we talk
Speaker 1: about link and much more. But you know, appreciate your time.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on.
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