If there’s been one crypto govt who has been singularly fixated, from day one, on bringing your complete world monetary system onchain, it is Sergey Nazarov, the co-founder of the decentralized oracle community Chainlink.
This characteristic is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 list.
Since Chainlink Labs was established in 2017, distinct from the Chainlink protocol, Nazarov has constantly expanded the community’s scope from “simply an oracle” for decentralized finance (DeFi), to a broad suite of instruments meant to energy just about each nook of on-chain finance — from tokenization to cross-chain connectivity to enterprise-grade information infrastructure.
“Chainlink enabled over $27 trillion in onchain transaction worth and is powering over 70% of all DeFi and greater than 80% on high chains like Ethereum. However the actual achievement was proving that superior good contracts can function throughout many chains and real-world methods, reliably, at scale, and in manufacturing,” Nazarov instructed CoinDesk.
Earlier this yr, the 37-year-old entrepreneur Nazarov framed 2025 because the “last stage” of blockchain adoption, arguing that governments, banks and asset managers are beginning to construct a world monetary system on the “Chainlink customary”: a framework for safe information, interoperability and settlement throughout chains.
Because the yr involves an finish, his prediction appears far much less formidable and lots nearer to actuality. In 2025, Chainlink partnered with the who’s who of financial giants, resembling Swift, DTCC, and UBS and even the U.S. government to maneuver all the pieces from macroeconomic information to real-world belongings onto blockchains. Nazarov’s protocol grew to become the important connective layer between the digital asset universe and the legacy finance world, bringing Chainlink that a lot nearer to its “endgame.”
Subsequent yr, Nazarov sees much more adoption by conventional monetary establishments. “We’re about 30% of the best way to world onchain adoption. In 2026, I anticipate that quantity to maneuver meaningfully larger as establishments and DeFi lastly function in a single unified atmosphere,” Nazarov stated.
Unsurprisingly, Grayscale Analysis lately described Chainlink because the “essential infrastructure” for tokenized finance, noting that the protocol’s LINK — the token with a market cap of almost $10 billion — affords diversified publicity to crypto’s infrastructure layer for traders.
In 2023, CoinDesk referred to as Nazarov the person who can rock both a plaid shirt and a three-piece suit, a metaphor for his function bridging two worlds. In 2025, with Chainlink solidifying its function because the important “plumbing” for tokenized belongings and cross-chain monetary infrastructure as each worlds converge, that symbolism feels much more apt.
Sergey Nazarov is talking at CoinDesk’s upcoming Consensus 2026 conference in Miami subsequent Might.
