Chainlink Co-founder Sergey Nazarov Affirms Shift in US Crypto Regulation
Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov stated that the crypto regulatory approach advanced by CFTC Chairman Michael Selig and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, supported by Trump, "is working"; this statement came from a White House digital assets industry conference.
The White House meeting gathered leaders from crypto and traditional financial institutions including Coinbase, Ripple, Robinhood, Kraken, Chainlink, Gemini, a16z, Nasdaq, and Intercontinental Exchange, with participation from the SEC, CFTC, and White House digital asset advisors, focusing on legislative market structure for digital assets and US industry competitiveness.
Trump urged Congress to pass a "fair version" of the CLARITY Act during the meeting and stated that regulators are studying how to allow Hyperliquid to serve the US market within a fully compliant framework. These actions indicate that the executive branch is simultaneously pushing for congressional legislation, regulatory rule-making, and discussions on specific product access.
Recently, the SEC proposed the "Regulation Crypto Assets" rule, setting a $5 million four-year startup exemption for token fundraising, a $75 million annual financing exemption, and a safe harbor for investment contracts; the CFTC will hold its first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting on August 20 to discuss crypto assets, AI, and prediction markets. Both initiatives have not yet resulted in final effective rules.
Chainlink, represented by Nazarov, primarily provides cross-chain data oracles, price feeds, cross-chain communication, and tokenized asset infrastructure. If regulatory boundaries are clarified, banks, funds, and trading venues can more easily connect on-chain assets with off-chain market data, compliance verification, and settlement processes, potentially expanding the commercial demand for oracle networks and institutional-grade on-chain infrastructure.
In market mechanisms, the buyers of policy certainty are financial institutions and asset issuers that require legal boundaries, market data, custody, compliance, and auditable settlements; the sellers are companies providing blockchain connectivity, oracles, identity verification, and trading infrastructure. The event is driven by White House policy coordination, with short-term beneficiary assets typically being mainstream crypto assets, US compliant trading platforms, and infrastructure tokens; long-term capital flows will still depend on the CLARITY Act, SEC final rules, and CFTC specific access requirements, rather than positive evaluations from industry executives.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Chainlink's capital path differs from exchanges: it does not center on retail trading fees but instead serves as an external data layer for on-chain financial applications by relaying off-chain prices, interest rates, proof documents, and cross-chain messages to smart contracts. It initially established a role in DeFi liquidation, collateral pricing, and stablecoin mechanisms, later expanding to the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and tokenized asset connections for financial institutions. In recent years, the SEC and CFTC have faced unclear boundaries regarding token attributes, trading venues, and derivatives jurisdiction, making it difficult for banks and large asset management institutions to integrate on-chain settlements into existing compliance frameworks. Now, the policy direction is shifting from enforcement-led to rule-making and market structure legislation discussions, with potential benefits for infrastructure like Chainlink not lying in the rise of a specific token, but in the increasing need for price data, reserve proofs, cross-chain communication, and verifiable settlement triggers from more regulated asset issuers. This can be compared to the positions of Bloomberg, DTCC, and SWIFT in traditional finance: they do not directly determine the value of securities or currencies but control the operational interfaces of institutional markets through data, messaging, and post-trade standards. Chainlink is currently attempting to expand from a DeFi oracle to a standard connection layer for tokenized assets; its challenge is to compete for institutional-level reliability and compliance trust against banks' self-built systems, native oracles on public chains, and traditional financial data providers. The essence is a reconstruction of the industrial chain. When financial assets are tokenized, on-chain contracts cannot inherently obtain key data such as interest rates, prices, identities, and real-world events, making data verification and cross-system transmission new value nodes. Clear regulation drives traditional finance onto the chain but simultaneously requires that data sources, accountability, and operational processes are auditable; infrastructures that can combine decentralized networks with institutional-level risk control will gain higher capital entry thresholds and bargaining power. ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Asset tokenization is not scarce; trustworthy data is scarce.
- The endpoint of financial innovation is verifiable accountability.
- Rules open the door, and infrastructure carries the funds.