Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov predicts tokenized equity surge

Sergey Nazarov thinks the stock market is about to move onchain, and he picked a fitting room to say it: a panel at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Speaking on September 25, 2026, the Chainlink co-founder predicted that the amount of tokenized equity will greatly increase as onchain markets grow. His argument rests on a fresh regulatory development: the SEC’s Innovation Exemption, a framework approved just before his remarks.

What the Innovation Exemption does

The Innovation Exemption is a five-year framework that allows onchain trading of tokenized US equities.

A tokenized equity is a share of stock represented as a token on a blockchain. Instead of living only in a brokerage’s internal ledger, ownership is recorded on a shared digital network that can, in theory, settle trades in real time.

According to Nazarov, the exemption is expected to catalyze a significant shift toward onchain trading. He framed the result as a more formal, real-time and efficient market infrastructure.

Nazarov also emphasized that the US equities market accounts for the majority of the global financial system’s equity value and flow, and said that market needs this technological transition to keep its leadership position worldwide.

A message delivered on repeat

The Philadelphia Fed panel was not a one-off. Nazarov has been carrying a similar argument across several high-profile venues in recent months.

At an August 2026 roundtable connected to the CFTC, including his involvement with the agency’s Innovation Advisory Committee, he projected that tokenizing equities could create significant value onchain.

At Sibos 2026, the annual banking and payments conference, he discussed how tokenization systems could support AI agents participating in trading processes.

Across these appearances, Nazarov has outlined three core benefits he attributes to tokenization:

• Improved liquidity, meaning assets can be bought and sold more easily
• Lower compliance costs, since rules can be built into the infrastructure itself
• Around-the-clock trading, removing the traditional market-hours constraint

Where Chainlink fits in

Chainlink builds infrastructure that tokenized markets would rely on. The company has implemented two key products for tokenized equity use cases. The first is Data Feeds, which supply external information like prices to blockchains. The second is the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, or CCIP, which lets different blockchains communicate and move assets between each other.

Chainlink has applied these tools to processes like corporate actions and settlement operations. Corporate actions cover events such as dividend payments or stock splits. According to the research summary, these tools are already helping pave the way for institutional adoption by streamlining those back-office processes.