Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and other major cryptocurrencies are currently trading sideways despite a shock BlackRock CEO crypto prediction.
The bitcoin price has doubled since the beginning of 2023, pushing the combined bitcoin, ethereum, XRP and crypto market back over $1 trillion (with an “enormous” China bombshell on the horizon).
Now, a widely-respected crypto developer has outlined how he sees the blockchain industry growing “very, very rapidly by trillions of dollars” as Wall Street giants converge on blockchain technology.
“You have this public blockchain and internet of contracts primarily defined by DeFi [decentralized finance], and you have this bank-chain world, which I think will be primarily defined by real-world asset tokens. The next stage will be getting these two worlds to overlap,” Sergey Nazarov, the cofounder of the chainlink blockchain network, told The Block on the sidelines of the EthereumETH 0.0% Community Conference in Paris.
Nazarov predicted Wall Street banks will build their own blockchains and cross-chain stablecoins, using chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol (CCIP), currently in an early access phase, to connect them. The protocol is designed as an “open-source global standard for decentralized inter-blockchain messaging, data, and token movements,” according to the Chainlink Foundation.
“And when that happens, beyond the efficiencies and the gains for each of these groups, then you will see the blockchain industry as a whole, I think grow very, very rapidly by trillions of dollars,” Nazarov said.
CCIP has been trialed with Swift, the global inter-bank messaging network, potentially allowing for cryptocurrency transfers across public and private chains via Swift’s messaging infrastructure.
Nazarov said chainlink—a network of nodes that provide data and information from off-blockchain sources to on-blockchain smart contracts—is “gearing up to launch a pilot. “If we go to a pilot with real value moving between different bank chains, I mean, then the sky’s the limit,” Nazarov said.
The 2022 crypto price crash, wiping around $2 trillion from the combined bitcoin, ethereum, XRP and crypto market, has spooked investors who had rushed headlong into crypto, echoing previous market cycles over the last decade.
However, last month the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, kicked off a race to a fully-fledged U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), demonstrating Wall Street interest has endured through the 2022 bitcoin and crypto price winter.
“This time is the first time after the four cycles that I’ve been through that [bank’s haven’t lost interest after the price crash] and I think the reason it hasn’t happened is because their clients want blockchain stuff,” Nazarov said, pointing to French bank giant Societe Generale recently developing a stablecoin and putting it on a public blockchain.
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