Sergey Nazarov is the co-founder of Chainlink, the decentralized oracle network that supplies outside data to blockchains. Born in 1986 in the Soviet Union, he moved to the United States with
Sergey Nazarov is the co-founder of Chainlink, the decentralized oracle network that supplies outside data to blockchains. Born in 1986 in the Soviet Union, he moved to the United States with his engineer parents in the early 1990s and earned a philosophy and management degree from New York University in 2007.
Much of his recent public work has taken place at banking and policy events. Today i.e on Sept. 24, he is scheduled to speak at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's 10th Annual Fintech Conference, his second year in a row at the event, on a panel with executives from BlackRock, Vanguard, and SharpLink.
Before Chainlink, Nazarov spent several years building small startups and working in venture capital. That early mix of product work and investing shaped how he approached blockchain infrastructure.
His early career moved quickly from teaching to startups.
SmartContract.com partnered with Cornell Tech professor Ari Juels to design a decentralized oracle network. That work produced Chainlink, introduced in 2017 with a white paper co-authored by Nazarov, Ellis, and Juels. Nazarov also joined a team that ran a pilot with SWIFT, the global bank messaging network, on automated bond payments using a smart contract. The early banking link explains much of Chainlink's current direction.
Blockchains are closed systems. A smart contract on Ethereum cannot check a stock price, an interest rate, or a bank balance by itself. This gap is known as the "oracle problem." An oracle is a service that fetches outside data and delivers it onchain.
If a single server supplies that data, it becomes a weak point that can be hacked or manipulated. Chainlink spreads the job across many independent node operators and combines their answers, so no single party controls the result.
Lending markets could explain this clearly. When a borrower's collateral drops in value, a lending protocol needs an accurate price to decide whether to liquidate the loan. A bad price can wipe out users unfairly.
"Total value secured" (TVS) is the combined value locked in apps that rely on an oracle for their data. Trackers use it to show how much value could be exposed if that oracle failed or delivered bad data.
Chainlink has grown well beyond price feeds. Its September 22 partnership with Infosys lists the full stack now offered to institutions.
As CEO of Chainlink Labs, Nazarov oversaw the build-out of both Proof of Reserve and CCIP.
His work with policymakers has grown over the past 18 months.
His Philadelphia Fed panel includes executives from BlackRock, Vanguard, and SharpLink. The topic is how new rules are changing digital assets.
Next week, he speaks in three sessions at Sibos 2026, the annual SWIFT conference in Miami Beach from September 28 to October 1. His sessions cover digital asset markets across jurisdictions, how programmable money and AI intersect, and interoperable finance.
Two September agreements show Chainlink targeting existing bank infrastructure rather than building parallel systems.
The Bottomline deal is the more concrete of the two.
Price action has improved this month, though analysts still see firm resistance above.
LINK trades at about $12.38, down 5% in 24 hours, according to Coingecko, but roughly 11% higher than a week ago. Analyst More Crypto Online marks $8.04 as key support and $13.90 to $20.60 as resistance.
Two sources of demand stand out:
