Sergey Nazarov: Why Hundreds Of Trillions Of Dollars Are Coming Onchain Right Now (Tokenization Supercycle)

At Sibos, Sergey Nazarov said digital assets have moved from a controversial topic to an implementation question, with tokenization increasingly treated as normal. He described bank and service-provider interest in Chainlink as being at a high point, especially because institutions want to use multiple chains without having to manage all of their underlying complexity. The larger opportunity, he argued, is not simply putting assets onchain, but enabling the financial workflows that become possible once those assets can move and interact across systems.

Issuing tokenized deposits, stablecoins, equities, or funds is only a starting point. Institutions also need advanced workflows that connect assets across chains and provide bridging, data, and compliance capabilities. Nazarov said financial firms are discovering that building these workflows takes longer than expected. As chains and smart contracts become more complex, he expects demand for infrastructure that can coordinate the necessary data, identity, asset movement, and business processes to increase.

Chainlink and Swift have worked for years with banks, including UBS, on transaction flows and designs. Nazarov said Chainlink’s CRE is being used as an interface for banks to access and transact on the Swift ledger; additional capabilities will depend on how Swift develops that ledger. At Sibos, DTCC announced a collateral-management workflow using Chainlink CRE, CCIP, data feeds, and other components to coordinate workflows, provide data, and move assets across chains. Nazarov called DTCC’s selection validation of Chainlink’s role in advanced smart contracts, while leaving production timing to DTCC.

Nazarov sees tokenized-equity securities lending as a particularly consequential use case, but said it needs critical mass across equity and collateral venues, prime brokers, agent lenders, custodians, and institutional investors. That coordination has not yet been achieved, though he said the market is getting close. He estimated that the opportunity could save larger banks multiple billions of dollars each and medium-sized institutions hundreds of millions. Tokenized equity could also support 24/7/365 movement, better yield and balance-sheet management, and lower funding requirements. If enough participants coordinate around DTCC-enabled tokenized equity, which he described as a potential “gold standard” because it carries the rights of standard equity, he expects tokenized-equity volume and yield to “skyrocket.”

The potential market is vast, although its scale depends on what is counted: Nazarov described traditional financial markets as worth tens of trillions of dollars, or hundreds of trillions when derivatives and notional values are included. He emphasized that tokenization’s value lies in the capabilities it enables, not in creating tokens for their own sake. Regulatory requirements also constrain how those capabilities can be implemented: final control and settlement must remain in legally acceptable off-chain locations, and onchain settlement may need to synchronize with traditional systems. In DTCC’s example, its App Chain and Ethereum represent mirrored loan obligations that must tie out with DTCC’s backend. Nazarov said Chainlink can manage that synchronization and cross-chain mirroring within one flow.

Chainlink’s role, in Nazarov’s account, has expanded beyond data provision to include bridging, identity, digital twins, accounting, and workflow orchestration through CRE. He said smart contracts remain at an early to early-mid stage of advancement, leaving room for more sophisticated workflows as institutional adoption grows. AI agents using stablecoins and onchain cash for payments were another emerging topic at Sibos. If agents become widely used to interact with tokenized assets, Nazarov said Chainlink could serve as their interface layer; he added that CRE is already optimized for AI use.