Sergey Nazarov: Tokenization Will 10x The Money Coming Onchain

Sergey Nazarov’s central argument is that crypto needs a much larger, continuing flow of new capital and activity to avoid stagnation and decline. He frames the ambition as bringing 10 times more money onchain than is currently available to DeFi. Tokenization is the proposed route, but issuing tokens or moving existing infrastructure onchain is not enough: the financial products themselves need to become more useful.

Nazarov points to potential improvements such as yield on tokenized gold, securities lending, continuous settlement and fund net asset value updates every minute. He cautions that yield on tokenized gold has not worked well so far, though he expects it to. The larger test for tokenization, in his view, is whether it enables services and market access that conventional financial arrangements do not provide as effectively.

Continuous markets depend on reliable data outside ordinary trading sessions. Nazarov says Chainlink’s 24/7 data combines sources, including weekend prices, through session-aware stitching, with oracle networks validating the resulting prices. That could allow onchain markets to keep operating over weekends, when investors might otherwise be unable to trade or manage risk. He also says CCIP can make settlement for real-world assets faster than traditional finance.

Custody Sync is intended to mirror assets held by custodians such as Anchorage onchain, letting users access DeFi without moving those assets out of the custodian’s security. Fulcrum is designed to support securities and cash lending across DeFi and traditional finance. Its components include CRE for orchestration, CCIP for cross-chain transfers, data sources, and ACE for compliance. Together, these systems are meant to connect assets and lending activity across different venues, rather than requiring every participant to operate in a single environment.

Nazarov said DTCC and Swift are not currently connected. If they were, he argued, the cash and securities sides of traditional finance could interoperate for securities lending, cash lending and repo. Potential collateral could include tokenized cash, money market funds or tokenized securities. Conditional locking and unlocking of tokens, alongside mirrored assets, could support those transactions; he said much of the relevant technology has already been implemented for partners, without claiming that the two institutions are connected today.

He also sees international markets as a significant opportunity, citing pent-up demand for assets such as US equities and funds that investors cannot readily access through traditional rails. Shared infrastructure could standardize data and valuations and provide cross-chain connectivity across institutions. Nazarov argues that reliability should rest on cryptographic proofs and guarantees, not simply on an infrastructure provider’s brand.

On agentic systems, Nazarov draws a boundary between autonomy and access: agents are not currently autonomous decision-makers, but a way for people to interact with systems. Chainlink is developing CRE capabilities that could let agents reach multiple chains, DeFi protocols and real-world assets under conditions set by users. He said a solution focused on agents in DeFi, securities lending and real-world assets has not been announced, and that more details may come probably this year.