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