Solving the Digital Islands Problem - a conversation with Frank Frank Seibold, Chainlink [EN]

And we are obviously working together.

We can deep dive on that as well.

With Chainlink, you have established really much an orchestration layer, which is currently being used by also major financial institutions such as Swift, UBS, JP Morgan.

So you have... become a bit also the go-to name with regards to how can we connect different chains, different blockchain applications, how can we feed data into the blockchain? So let's talk about that.

Starting also on what is part of your core, but obviously only one part of your offering, let's start on the data side.

So can you quickly elaborate a bit what Chainlink is doing in the data world and why the offer of Chainlink is so important?

Look, I mean, Chainlink at its core solved for the Oracle problem.

How do you inject data into smart contracts reliably? As we all know, blockchain is something that drives finality, instantaneous settlement, and all the more is there a requisite focus on ensuring that the data that you inject into a smart contract that executes something on the back of that injection of data.

is using data that is non-mutilated, that is clean, and that has a consensus mechanism that presents that data reliably without interception so that the smart contract can do its job and liquidate Frank

because

Frank's collateral is no longer sufficient.

And so because of that finality, all the more focus is required to be on the injection of data into smart contracts or into blockchain systems.

So now when we talk about data, it's all about also price data, net asset values, asset under management and data points like that.

So can you elaborate a bit on how you are now moving beyond that data topic and what is the offering of Chainlink apart from data?

So we're moving from, we're trying to help our industry partners to move from manual reconciliation across multiple systems to a shared platform.

on-chain source of truth, golden source of truth, if you want.

We do smart NAF, where fund administrators, using the example of one of the many workforce in the asset management space, publish a net asset value once, and every participant in the ecosystem that we build and orchestrate is referencing the same data.

So all that friction goes away in that ideal world of like one golden source of truth where we are blowing through like, I don't know, $60 billion worth of unnecessary cost.

And that fundamentally changes how portfolios are viewed and managed from an asset management perspective.

So it's less about reconciling records and playing around with that stuff, but more about acting on that consistent golden source of truth.

And the key point is, in my mind at least, that you can run institutional grade smart contracts or smart contract based systems on bad or inconsistent data.

Going back to my Oracle problem that we solved.

And that's why I think the data layer that we create with industry partners or for industry partners like yourself really matters.

And you think about like the last 12 to 14 months, we signed up quite a few traditional finance platforms that provide that kind of data.

Think about Deutsche Börse, we had a big announcement with them not too long ago, where we're already publishing what's available, which is billions of data points that can feed into a smart contract, a smart nav, like corporate action, smart contract, so that we bring institutional-grade data to institutional-grade smart contracts on-chain in a usable, reliable way.