As global finance upgrades to tokenized assets and blockchain-based systems, Chainlink has entered the market as the connection point between traditional markets and decentralized technologies. Sergey Nazarov has led this development from its early stages, whose career in blockchain began in 2010.
By co-founding Chainlink, he solved a critical technical challenge: how to connect smart contracts to real-world data in a secure and verifiable way. Nazarov studied Philosophy and Management at New York University, where he also worked as a teaching assistant to Lawrence Lenihan, a venture capital and entrepreneurship professor.
After graduating, he joined FirstMark Capital as an associate. Around 2010, Nazarov got involved with the Bitcoin community. This entry point was the beginning of his long-term focus on blockchain systems, which at the time were a niche technology outside mainstream finance.
By 2014, Nazarov had shifted fully into the blockchain industry. His early projects involved applying blockchain technology to practical, real-world applications beyond currency. That year, he co-founded CryptaMail, a decentralized email service.
He also founded Secure Asset Exchange, a platform facilitating tokenization, foreshadowing later developments in digital asset markets. Another project from this period was SmartContract, launched in 2014. The company pioneered how smart contracts are connected with external data sources to enable automated financial agreements.
In 2016, SmartContract won the SWIFT Industry Challenge, hosted by the world’s largest financial messaging cooperative. The project highlighted use cases such as bond issuance and dividend payments, where contracts are executed automatically based on LIBOR rate data.
Chainlink formally launched in 2019 and quickly found widespread adoption across DeFi. The largest DeFi protocols, such as Aave, MakerDAO, and Compound, required accurate, secure, and tamper-resistant price feeds to function. Chainlink’s system, which relied on multiple independent node operators and layers of decentralization to source and verify data, provided the critical missing link to grow this emerging industry.
As DeFi expanded, Chainlink quickly became the dominant oracle provider, securing applications that hosted tens of billions of dollars in value. Its widespread integration across the largest protocols contributed to its recognition as the industry standard for decentralized data infrastructure.
Apart from DeFi, Nazarov positioned Chainlink as the system to enable institutions to onboard to the blockchain industry. The network was used by organizations such as SWIFT, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Euroclear, and some of the largest banks in the world, including J.P. Morgan and ANZ.
Nazarov’s work has been recognized within the blockchain sector. Following the 2016 SWIFT Industry Challenge win, he became a popular leader in the blockchain industry and in policy discussions. In 2019 and again in 2023, he was named to CoinDesk’s list of the most influential people in blockchain, highlighting his role in shaping decentralized finance.
In 2024, he was awarded Best Web3 Personality of the Year. Nazarov’s published works include the original Chainlink white paper (2017), Mixicles: Simple Private Decentralized Finance (2019), and Chainlink 2.0 (2021), which discussed the expansion of oracle networks to support more complex applications.
In 2023, he co-authored Connecting Blockchains: Overcoming Fragmentation in Tokenised Assets, a paper covering how blockchain systems support large-scale tokenization of assets and secure interoperability. Nazarov also holds patents in the United States, including inventions for interfacing smart contracts with external data sources.
As blockchain technology attracted regulatory attention, Nazarov emerged as a participant in policy dialogue. In 2025, he attended the White House Digital Assets Summit hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump, where he discussed the evolving relationship between government and digital asset industries.
Today, Chainlink is securing a hundred billion dollars in value across decentralized applications and provides interoperability for institutions involved with tokenized assets. Its role as the leading decentralized oracle network places it at the center of the future of finance.