Witness TradFi's iPhone-Moment

Gagan Jain, Director of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Digital Assets, posted on LinkedIn that tomorrow we’ll be able to witness the iPhone-moment for TradFi at DTCC's "The Great Experiment" event.

Within his post, he links to an article he published yesterday called "Integration, Not Isolation: The Real Path Forward for DeFi and TradFi" where he advocates for a fundamental re-architecture of TradFi to strengthen resilience and to take advantage of the digital infrastructure tools now available.

Gagan provides a hint of the roadmap:

- Shifting to distributed ledger technology-based settlement rails that enable real-time clearing and atomic settlement

- Tokenizing real-world financial assets so they can move seamlessly, instantly, and transparently across institutional and geographic boundaries

- Adopting smart contracts to automate complex post-trade processes, reduce operational risk, and eliminate redundant reconciliation

- Embracing a composable financial architecture, where systems can interoperate natively instead of being stitched together through expensive, slow custom integrations

🤝 Chainlink and DTCC’s Collaborations

To date, DTCC has shared the results of two collaborations with Chainlink, exploring how blockchain technology can be integrated into traditional financial systems, focusing on interoperability and the tokenization of financial assets.

2023: Bringing Capital Markets Onchain with DTCC and Chainlink

In 2023, DTCC participated in Swift's blockchain interoperability initiative, collaborating with Chainlink to explore cross-chain messaging and token transfers. Utilizing Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), the project demonstrated how financial institutions could use existing Swift infrastructure to interact with multiple blockchains. DTCC contributed by minting and issuing "BondTokens" compatible with CCIP, distributing them to Swift's designated test wallets. This pilot underscored the potential for integrating blockchain capabilities into established financial systems without overhauling existing infrastructures

Source: https://www.dtcc.com/dtcc-connection/articles/2023/september/21/bringing-capital-markets-onchain-with-dtcc-and-chainlink

2024: Smart NAV Pilot Report: Bringing Trusted Data to the Blockchain Ecosystem

Building on their previous collaboration, DTCC and Chainlink launched the Smart NAV pilot in 2024, focusing on the tokenization of mutual fund data. The pilot aimed to deliver net asset value (NAV) data on-chain, facilitating real-time, automated data dissemination across various blockchain networks. By leveraging Chainlink's CCIP, the initiative ensured a chain-agnostic approach, allowing for broad compatibility. The pilot involved major financial institutions, including JPMorgan, BNY Mellon, and Franklin Templeton, and demonstrated the feasibility of integrating structured NAV data into on-chain applications, such as tokenized funds and smart contracts

Source: https://www.dtcc.com/dtcc-connection/articles/2024/may/16/smart-nav-pilot-report-bringing-trusted-data-to-the-blockchain-ecosystem

🪄 Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE)

Since the announced DTCC collaborations, Chainlink has been cooking 🧑‍🍳

Chainlink announced the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE): A Major Upgrade to the Chainlink Platform at the end of 2024, a platform for users to compose chainlink's many services into custom solutions to suit their needs.

Sergey talks about CRE being the "final piece of the puzzle" for chainlink that will "enable the interconnection of hundreds of oracle networks, thousands of chains, all the world's data, all the world's payment systems into a single application" ... "we're getting the integrations with all the largest payment systems"

🥽 DTCC’s “The Great Experiment”

The DTCC announced a new platform for tokenized real-time collateral management on April 2nd, 2025 and with that “The Great Experiment” event where they plan to demo the platform live.

You can register for “The Great Experiment” here, assuming it’s not already over when you read this.

📲 Chainlink’s iPhone Moment

At “The Great Experiment”, we may get a glimpse at continued collaboration between DTCC and Chainlink.

If so, not only will it be TradFi's iPhone moment, it will also be $LINK's

— Wahndo

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