The Present and Future of Chainlink

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Raoul Pal** (0:36)
People are going to lose their minds. This is a moment in history, unlike anything humanity has gone through. It's a very different world for humans to come.

**David Mattin** (0:43)
Take a step back and see the broad picture, which is the way all these technologies are interlinked.

**Raoul Pal** (0:49)
Because this is all about exponentiality, and humans can't think in exponential terms.

**David Mattin** (0:54)
How consequential do you want to say machine intelligence is? It's almost certainly as consequential as writing. How long did writing take to disseminate through the human population? Hundreds, thousands of years, and we're dealing with it now on a scale of months.

**Raoul Pal** (1:09)
But in this world, you're compounding 100 percent growth every year, and the numbers become astronomical.

**David Mattin** (1:16)
AI is going to spot patterns in the world that were just completely invisible to us.

**Raoul Pal** (1:21)
Even if you think that the AI and the robots are your demise, you might as well bloody invest in them and make some money out of it. If not, you're just going to be an angry man shaking your fist at the clouds.

**Ash Bennington** (1:44)
Hey, everybody, welcome back to Real Vision Pro Crypto. I'm joined today by Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink. Sergey, welcome back to the show.

**Sergey Nazarov** (1:53)
Great to see you. Thanks for having me.

**Ash Bennington** (1:56)
Well, it's always a pleasure to have you here. I always enjoy these conversations because you're not afraid to go deep in the technology, and I know our Real Vision Pro viewers love to get a sense of what's going on under the hood. Sergey, it's been a while since we've done this. I know we've covered a lot of this material before, but big picture for folks who are relatively new to the picture. Talk a little bit about Chainlink and the role that you see oracles playing in the digital asset space.

**Sergey Nazarov** (2:20)
Sure, sounds good. So oracles are an infrastructure that create consensus about various things that blockchains do not create consensus about. So blockchains create reliable transactions through consensus, through the ability to agree across a number of different systems, what that transaction is, and to memorialize it across those systems. Blockchains create consensus on three things, private key signatures, token ledgers, and state machines called smart contracts. So those are the only things that blockchains create consensus and therefore cryptographic guarantees about.
Everything else outside of blockchains, whether it's data, trust minimized computation, cross-chain communication, connectivity with any existing systems, basically all data, all computation, all connectivity, both between blockchains and between blockchains and existing systems. If you want that to be as secure and reliable as a blockchain, you need a system to do that.
The main system to do that, really the only system to do that is Oracle networks. Decentralized Oracle networks is what Chainlink pioneered, which is basically an environment in which you can aggregate data that you feed into DeFi. You can do various computations that you can't do on a blockchain, but still need to be decentralized and trust minimized. You can connect multiple blockchains to each other. You can connect existing bank systems to blockchains so they can use thousands of blockchains through one interface.
All of these interactions need to be made as reliable as the blockchain itself because they fundamentally control what's going on on-chain. And so, if you leave the thing that's controlling the on-chain state to insecure, easy to manipulate, easy for adversaries to access, then you break the security model and you break the guarantees of those on-chain things. And so that's why Chainlink so far has processed approximately $9 trillion in transaction value through these decentralized oracle networks because there are all these other things, whether that's data or computation or cross-chain connectivity, that on-chain contracts, on-chain things need in order to become more advanced. The parallel for the web world is that before you had the ability to connect applications to other systems, applications were very limited. So something like Uber couldn't exist until you were able to connect it to geolocation data about the user and the driver or a text messaging system or a payment system. You couldn't build Uber until you could connect it to all those other systems.