Ethereum and Chainlink: Building the Settlement and Connectivity Layer for the Tokenized Global Econ

Transcript

Test, test. Okay, it's working. All right. Hello everyone. So, I'm just going to try to see if the slides work. Perfect. Okay. Look, if you've been looking at the world in the last few years, you will have noticed something. Our world is changing extremely, extremely fast. We're seeing a new crisis come up every two, every three years. The very foundations of our society is unraveling through this crisis. Mistrust is spreading across every single pillar of our society, whether it's around money, information, or the global order we rely on.

Now, if you've been in this space for a long time, you'll remember our space comes from crisis. Bitcoin was created in 2008 after the GFC. DeFi summer came up in 2020 after the COVID crisis. The whole industry we're built on is based on a very simple premise. The foundations of our society are not that solid, and at some point the very system we rely upon is going to break like every system before. And we're going to need to build something new instead of it. That's what crypto is about. Crypto is directly correlated with mistrust in our system. The more the system breaks

down, the more crypto rises and growth. That's a very simple foundation of our space. How is the system breaking down? Starting with information. Information is the way we see the world. It's the way we perceive reality. It literally informs the view you have of this whole system and this whole world. Well, today our information ecosystem is completely broken. If you look at social media, most of the stuff you're looking at is literally AI slope. It's information that's manufactured and created for you. And very often it's creating a fake reality for you.

Most people don't trust legacy media anymore. Mistrust in information has never been so high. If you look at money, money is the energy of this world. If you don't have trust in the money system, most societies can't work, can't function. Well, people have never mistrusted money around the globe more than today. If you look at 2020, before 2020 could you think of people talking about inflation? Nobody even knew what inflation was back in the day. After 2020, when we had to print unprecedented amounts of money, everyone now knows what inflation is.

And guess what? With the crisis happening today in the Middle East, with the price of commodities like oil, gas, fertilizer, which our whole economies are built upon, inflation is going to become a very, very real problem in the next few months. What about the global order? Well, we inherited a very pretty cool global order if you think of it. Every country was connected, people were trading with each other, there were alliances, there was trust between countries. What are we seeing today? We're seeing mistrust between countries. We're seeing a complete breakdown of the order. We're seeing tariffs and war replace alliances and commerce.

Now, this presentation is not meant to be screen is not working. Nice. This information is this presentation is not meant to be completely bleak, right? But it's meant to be a realistic. We are living through a breakdown of the order. And when these breakdowns happen, you can do two things. You can complain about it and cry about it. Sure, we could do that. Or we could build a new system, the system to replace it. That's what this space is about, nothing else. Bitcoin was created because of mistrust in the monetary system and because there was a need to replace the monetary system we had with something new. Ethereum was created because of mistrust in institutions and the need

for a system that doesn't rely on counterparty risk, that doesn't rely on institutions for you to be able to move or own any asset. And Chainlink was created for mis- to solve mistrust in information so we could get real data, data folks and contracts can trust. Those are the key things we're solving in this ecosystem to ensure that the breakdown which is happening today will have a follow-up with a new system built on Chainlink. How does this work exactly? Well, let's look at COVID.

COVID was in many aspects the precursor of DeFi summer. What happened during COVID? Mistrust in the system hit record highs. Institutions started going down and started in terms of trust within the within their respective countries in a way we had never seen before. We had two big events happen. The first one was we brought interest rates to zero, meaning we had unprecedented amount of money printing. Most people couldn't find any yield opportunities for their assets. A second thing which happened is many people were locked out of their bank accounts. Their money was frozen because they didn't agree with the current narrative.

So, this created a wave of mistrust within the institutions around the globe. And what did what did this create? This created an opportunity for DeFi, for our space. People started looking for yield opportunities and they started looking for assets which couldn't be seized or taken away from them. That's what DeFi was about. It was a flight to a space that was better and that offered an alternative compared to the big issues of our time. And because of this, DeFi grew. It grew from zero dollars to billions of dollars in the span of a few months.

This type of growth does not happen because of nice UX, nice UI, or cheap gas costs. It happens because the system is breaking down and people are looking for an alternative. That's why DeFi grew so much. And at the very root of DeFi were two core systems which still underpin it today. Chainlink data and Ethereum. These two systems combined are the root of the tree that sprang up, the DeFi tree I like to call it. I don't know. Now, this tree, if you were an OG, you'll remember was made of very few fruits back then in 2019, 2020.

Aave, Ampleforth, Nexus Mutual, Loopring, the OGs will remember. Goes way back. This tree has grown a ton since that day. number of use cases DeFi covers have literally 10x. We started with lending markets. We now see prediction markets. We see derivatives. We see perpetual exchanges. We see TradFi building on Chainlink. DeFi has slowly been re- redoing and reshaping legacy systems. Now, this reshaping is happening in some very old key legacy systems such as commodities trading.

With commodities trading we saw a very interesting thing happen a few weeks ago. The crisis in the Middle East started, obviously on a Saturday. On Saturday you can't trade commodities, right? You can't trade oil, you can't trade gold, silver. You couldn't hedge your positions. How were you able to do that? You went on Chainlink, used perp DEXs. In the last few weeks only, we've went from tens of millions of volume on perp DEXs on commodities to hundreds of millions. In terms of news, legacy media is slowly being reshaped by our space as well. If you look at Polymarket and its rise, Polymarket was the first one to announce the correct outcome of the US election

in 2024. It was more reliable than most so-called experts on legacy media that you saw. And today, Polymarket is usually is referred more often than experts to understand what's going to happen in the future in terms of news and information. Polymarket, perp DEXs, they do share one common theme. They're built on top of Chainlink's data. Actually, most of the space shares this common theme. If you look at the values our oracle networks have secured in the last few years, the numbers are honestly mind-boggling.

We've grown from zero dollars in value a few years ago to having enabled 28.6 trillion dollars in value today. Ecosystems like Ethereum rely at 80% on Chainlink's data for things like DeFi. Arbitrum, 83. Base, 96. The whole space DeFi ecosystem relies at 68% on Chainlink's data ecosystem. Now, we have been at the very root of the transformation, at the of the root of the rise of DeFi. And I believe we will be at the same root for the transformations that's to come.

Because we're only at the precipice of a next big shift in our whole world. This shift is coming from the global crisis we're witnessing today. As I said earlier, we didn't inherit a world which was built on trust. The systems we used for things like global commerce were based on trust between countries, between institutions. This trust is fading away slowly. How do we rebuild a global commercial, global trade network if people don't trust each other's infra?

They need neutral infrastructure to settle. That's what Chainlink, that's what Ethereum offer. This neutrality, this decentralization is what's going to be so key in the years to come. And that's really what tokenization is about. If you think of it, tokenization is about bringing the whole world's information, assets, payment, on chain through neutral platforms, through Chainlink oracle networks into blockchains like Ethereum to enable to rebuild the global commercial system directly on chain. That's the next challenge of our day. And we've already started tackling this challenge.

The way it looks is very simple. Let's take this example. We worked on this with the Brazilian Central Bank. In this specific project I'm showing here, we have a tokenized commodity being issued in Brazil. This tokenized commodity has a buyer based in Hong Kong. We have two blockchains here, two institutions. These two need a neutral network to connect them. Chainlink in this network is this network in this case. We allow the tokenized commodity to be traded with a stablecoin from another country. In this other example I'm showing here, we have a tokenized commercial paper being issued in Singapore through a DDX.

This tokenized commercial paper needs to be traded with a stablecoin issued in Australia. Here again, we have two blockchains, two institutions. They need one connector to do the trade between the two. Chainlink is this connector. In this specific use case I'm showing here, we have a privacy layer. That's because most of the TradFi features that are needed for their day-to-day will have to be translated on chain. Features such as privacy, interoperability composability orchestration. That's what Chainlink has been working on for the last few years.

We've been working on enabling all of these use cases that TradFi takes for granted to be performed in an on chain world. So we can link TradFi to DeFi. Now, as I said earlier, we're really at the very beginning stage of the next wave of adoption for our space. The whole space we know of today comes from a crisis called the COVID crisis in 2020. That's where growth happened. That's where the use cases like Polymarket, Perp Dexes, lending really took off. You can do this exercise later. Look at all of the names I just mentioned. They were literally all born in 2020.

It's a paradox of our space that whenever a crisis happens, our space does very well. That's the way it is, right? That's our paradox. We shine the most when the world around us gets bleak, gets dark. But frankly, this is a feature, not a bug. We're working on technology that can reshape the entire world and solve the problems of our time. Other technologies actually make the problems of our time worse. We work on technology that allows us to rebuild a better world, and I think this is very important. So that's why I really wanted to discuss today about the high-level picture.

We've been working at Chainlink. We've been working on the Ethereum ecosystem with values in mind. One of these core values has been things like decentralization neutrality having networks which are not owned by one single country, one single institution, networks that are owned by no one but serve everyone. And I truly think that in the next few months, few years, these features are going to be extremely critical for the world. So, it's exciting times. Thank you very much everyone.

Do you have any No? No questions? One? Sorry, no questions.