From NYU Teaching Assistant to White House Spotlight: Chainlink Founder Took No Shortcuts

On August 19, at the White House Technology Leaders Summit, Chainlink founder Sergey Nazarov stood beside Trump to speak about the impact of tokenization on the U.S. economy, with the chairs of the SEC and CFTC also present. The significance of his presence on stage was clear.

Compared to the eccentric figures in the industry, Nazarov's growth path seems more relatable to the average person. He shows us how a liberal arts student without a strong background or top-notch technical skills can gradually reach a core position in the industry through diligence, trial and error, and adjustments. If you're feeling a bit lost about the future and interested in oracle technology, this might be worth a read.

A Russian Boy Who Loved to Dismantle Things

Born in the Soviet Union in 1986, Nazarov's parents were both engineers. He first sat in front of a keyboard at the age of five. Although he ultimately did not pursue a technical path, he learned how to understand technical issues and collaborate efficiently with technical personnel, influenced by his family background. During his childhood, Nazarov was obsessed with one thing: dismantling objects and putting them back together, turning household items like televisions and vacuum cleaners into his toys. Perhaps it was through this hands-on process that the philosophy of "deconstructing complex problems and providing solutions" was seeded in his mind.

In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union underwent dramatic changes. Many state-owned research institutions and engineering units disbanded, and what people thought would be lifelong stable jobs were shattered overnight, with prices spiraling out of control. In this context, immigration became a common choice for that generation of engineers and intellectuals—Nazarov's family immigrated to New York. Years later, Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, who often intersected with him in the DeFi and RWA space, moved with his family from Estonia to Helsinki, Finland. In some ways, their starting points share a similar historical backdrop.

Encountering a Life-Changing Mentor

Like most families that value education, Nazarov's parents also emphasized moral development. In 2007, Sergey Nazarov graduated from New York University with a major in philosophy and management. Shortly after graduation, he entered the investment and entrepreneurship circle, working for Lawrence Lenihan, who had a profound impact on him.

Lenihan was not a professor focused on traditional academic research but a practitioner who had achieved success in the industry and was invited by the university as a visiting lecturer. His career began at IBM, and he started his entrepreneurial journey in 1996, co-founding the venture capital firm Pequot Ventures, which later evolved into FirstMark Capital—a firm that ranks among the upper echelon of New York's venture capital scene, having invested in projects like Pinterest, Shopify, and Riot Games (later acquired by Tencent for $400 million).

After graduating, Nazarov joined FirstMark Capital under Lenihan, growing from an entry-level position to an analyst, officially entering New York's core venture capital circle. At the same time, around 2010, he also served as a teaching assistant for Lenihan's technology entrepreneurship course at NYU Stern School of Business. From his public resume, it is likely that Nazarov was recognized by Lenihan during this period, gaining greater opportunities for development—but Lenihan was not simply handing out resources; Nazarov clearly earned his recognition step by step through trials and accumulation.

Observing Before Starting a Business

While having a mentor is important, Nazarov deeply understands the value of self-reliance. During his time at FirstMark, he started his first entrepreneurial venture: a small company called Exist Local Inc., similar to Airbnb, which helped users looking for deep experiences in New York find individuals willing to provide services, essentially creating a P2P platform for local experiences. This venture was relatively unremarkable, more of a practice attempt, but it helped Nazarov build the courage and experience needed for entrepreneurship.

After a period of part-time entrepreneurship, Nazarov resigned from FirstMark Capital and fully committed to starting his own business. He turned his attention back to his hometown in Russia, establishing a venture capital firm called QED Capital, attempting to bring the methods he learned in New York's venture capital circle—"how to filter projects, how to work with founders to refine directions, how to participate in board decisions"—to the still-nascent Russian tech teams, aiming for a relatively gentle and founder-friendly approach, rather than the traditional VC's pursuit of control.

Unfortunately, Nazarov's reform ideals in tech venture capital did not leave behind many publicly verifiable investment results. The root cause may not have been the failure of his attempts, but rather that through observing others' projects daily, he had already identified a specific technical problem in his mind—seeing more made him realize that no one was addressing it, prompting him to step in and get involved.

From Investing in Others to Solving His Own Problems

Notably, even during his time at QED Capital, this entrepreneur, who always juggled multiple jobs, rented GPU mining machines to mine Bitcoin, earning quite a bit—he recouped his rental costs in the first week of a three-month rental period. It can be said that Nazarov's attention to the crypto industry came much earlier than many might imagine.

Around 2014, Nazarov adjusted his entrepreneurial direction, returning to New York and trying three different directions within a year: first briefly attempting a decentralized email project called CryptaMail, quickly shifting to Secure Asset Exchange (SAE), and then founding SmartContract—the precursor to Chainlink.

Among these three projects, CryptaMail was merely a brief exploration, with the focus on Secure Asset Exchange and SmartContract. These two projects shared a co-founder—Steve Ellis. Ellis also graduated from NYU, obtaining a degree in computer science in 2010, making him a junior to Nazarov. After graduation, he worked as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, focusing on developing payment automation systems—this is closely related to the later oracle network that can automatically settle and trigger payments. In 2014, Ellis and Nazarov hit it off, with one taking on the role of CTO and the other as CEO, a division of labor that continues to this day.

An Early Form of DeFi That Came Too Soon

If we compare their two entrepreneurial projects to children, the firstborn, Secure Asset Exchange, is a typical case of a concept arriving too early for a market that wasn't ready. Understanding Secure Asset Exchange helps to better grasp Nazarov's later thinking and the concepts of RWA and DeFi.

In 2014, Ethereum was still in the conceptual and preparatory stages (officially launched in 2015), and there was a relatively similar chain called Nxt on the market. The goal of Secure Asset Exchange was to help users purchase digital assets on the Nxt chain directly with their BTC without needing to download the Nxt client. Furthermore, these assets could be designed as on-chain contracts resembling "crypto bonds," "crypto equities," or other contracts with automated profit distribution mechanisms, allowing users to automatically receive returns according to pre-agreed rules.

Looking at it today, this idea resembles a hybrid of DeFi, RWA, and on-chain securitization; however, in 2014, it faced an awkward problem: there simply weren't enough high-quality on-chain assets, and users might as well hold onto their BTC. Additionally, the Nxt ecosystem was still too early, with insufficient developers and users to form a network effect. Due to multiple reasons, Secure Asset Exchange was shut down in early 2016 after operating for about a year and a half.

The Real Problem: How to Connect Data Effectively

In contrast to Secure Asset Exchange, SmartContract, which was established a few months later, seemed to have found the right direction from the start. It secured seed funding led by Underscore VC and co-invested by Data Collective, enough to sustain the team's operations for a long time.

At that time, Ellis and Nazarov had already begun writing smart contracts for large financial institutions and insurance companies, but they repeatedly encountered a problem during delivery: how to connect internal contracts to external data and APIs? They identified this market gap and gradually shifted their focus to oracles that transmit external information.

However, the underlying technology of oracles was largely similar; how could they gain the trust of banks? Their solution was to participate in competitions to obtain one of the most coveted tickets to the traditional financial world. In 2016, SmartContract entered the Industry Challenge organized by SWIFT's Innotribe—a public competition for fintech companies across the industry, focusing on how to use blockchain to transform the lifecycle management of securities.

SmartContract ultimately won and was invited to present at SWIFT's annual conference, Sibos, showcasing an automated bond lifecycle solution based on smart contracts.

The following year, at the 2017 Sibos conference, Nazarov led the team again, conducting a more advanced live demonstration: using oracles to connect external LIBOR interest rate data to smart contracts, automatically calculating the interest on a bond, and generating messages compliant with ISO20022 standards to send settlement instructions via the SWIFT network. This is considered the starting point of Chainlink's collaboration with SWIFT. Over the years, Nazarov has continued to participate in Sibos, and Chainlink has gradually become one of the most important partners in the banking industry.

It can even be said that if one day the crypto industry is proven to be a false proposition, the services provided by Chainlink will still be needed by large financial institutions—because it addresses not only the issue of information exchange between on-chain and off-chain but also accelerates settlement speeds. Traditional systems require multiple intermediaries to confirm transactions: the initiating bank, the custodian bank, the clearinghouse, the counterparty's custodian bank, and the counterparty's bank, with each step requiring its own accounting, verification, and confirmation, many of which only process in bulk during fixed hours on business days. By introducing an oracle network, multiple nodes can read and verify data simultaneously, pushing settlement instructions once confirmed, no longer limited by banking hours.

Today, Chainlink has established public collaborations with a series of large financial institutions, including SWIFT, DTCC (the U.S. Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation), Euroclear (one of Europe's largest securities infrastructures), Clearstream (the securities infrastructure under the Deutsche Börse system), Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase.

Conclusion

Having completed the first half of Nazarov's journey, what inspires me most is not how important the concept of "oracles" is, but rather that the path he chose is largely replicable:

First, enter a sufficiently good environment—be it a school, a company, or a community. Focus on doing the current task well, gaining recognition, and receiving help from mentors, then leverage that to reach a larger platform.

Throughout this process, continuously accumulate and experiment, even if ventures like Exist Local, QED Capital, CryptaMail, and Secure Asset Exchange incur a lot of "tuition fees," one can still identify the true market needs and find a direction to root oneself.

Once the direction is found, earn an industry-recognized ticket through real competitions, and then persist for a decade, solving the real problems faced by practitioners, rather than spending all energy on storytelling, concept creation, and marketing.

This is probably why I continue to have faith in the industry. Even though many are pessimistic and many are fishing in troubled waters, there are always people investing their youth and wisdom here, trying to solve real problems one by one.

And Nazarov is just one of them.

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