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

On Aug. 19, at the White House Tech Leaders Summit, Chainlink founder Sergey Nazarov stood beside Trump to speak on the impact of tokenization on the U.S. economy, with the SEC and CFTC chairs also in attendance. The weight of his presence on that stage was self-evident.

Compared to the more eccentric figures in the space, Nazarov's growth path seems closer to that of an ordinary person. He shows us how a liberal arts student without a powerful background or top-tier technical skills can, through steady work, trial and error, and adjustment, gradually reach a core position in the industry. If you're feeling uncertain about the future and interested in oracle technology, this is worth a read.

A Russian Boy Who Took Things Apart

Nazarov was born in the Soviet Union in 1986 to engineer parents. He first sat at a keyboard at age five. Although he ultimately didn't pursue a technical path, he was more or less influenced by his family, learning how to understand technical problems and collaborate efficiently with technical staff. In childhood, Nazarov was also obsessed with one thing: taking things apart and putting them back together. The TV and vacuum cleaner at home became his toys. Perhaps it was in this hands-on process that the philosophy of "deconstructing complex problems and providing solutions" planted a seed in his heart.

In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union underwent upheaval. Many state-run research institutions and engineering units disbanded, and the iron rice bowl jobs people thought would last a lifetime were shattered overnight, with prices spiraling completely out of control. Against this backdrop, emigration became a common choice for that generation of engineers and intellectuals—Nazarov's family immigrated to New York. Years later, Aave founder Stani Kulechov, who would cross paths with him in DeFi and RWA, moved with his family from Estonia to Helsinki, Finland. Their starting points, to some extent, shared a similar era-defining backdrop.

Meeting a Life-Changing Mentor

Like most families that value education, Nazarov's parents also emphasized character 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 startup world, where his boss was Lawrence Lenihan, who would have a profound influence on him.

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

After graduation, Nazarov joined FirstMark Capital under Lenihan, growing from an entry-level position to analyst and formally entering New York's core venture capital circle. At the same time, around 2010, he served as a teaching assistant for Lenihan's technology entrepreneurship course at NYU Stern School of Business. From his public resume, Nazarov was likely recognized by Lenihan during this period and given more room to grow—but Lenihan didn't hand out resources blindly. From entry-level intern to analyst, Nazarov clearly went through trials and accumulation, earning recognition step by step before getting a bigger stage.

To Start a Business, First Observe

While having a mentor is important, Nazarov deeply understood the value of self-reliance. During his time at FirstMark, he began his first venture: a small company called ExistLocal Inc., similar to Airbnb, helping users who wanted to experience New York in depth find individuals willing to provide services, matching them one-to-one—essentially 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 for entrepreneurship.

After some time running this side business, Nazarov left FirstMark Capital to focus fully on entrepreneurship. He turned his attention back to his homeland, Russia, founding the venture capital firm QED Capital, aiming to bring the entire methodology he learned in New York's VC circle—how to screen projects, how to work with founders to refine direction, how to participate in board decisions—to Russia's still-immature tech teams, taking a relatively gentle, founder-friendly approach rather than the traditional VC pursuit of control.

Unfortunately, Nazarov's reformist ideals for tech venture capital didn't leave many publicly verifiable investment results. But the root cause may not have been that his attempts failed, but rather that in the process of constantly reviewing others' projects, he had already formed a specific technical problem in his mind—the more he looked, the more he realized no one was solving it, so he stepped in himself.

From Investing in Others to Solving His Own Problem

It's worth noting that as early as the QED Capital period, this entrepreneur who always juggled multiple jobs also rented GPU miners to mine Bitcoin, and the income was substantial—on a three-month lease, he recouped his costs in the first week. It's fair to say Nazarov's attention to the crypto industry came much earlier than many people imagine.

Around 2014, Nazarov adjusted his entrepreneurial direction and returned to New York, trying three directions within a year: first a brief attempt at a decentralized email project called CryptaMail, quickly pivoting to Secure Asset Exchange (SAE), and then founding SmartContract—the predecessor of Chainlink.

Among these three projects, CryptaMail was only a brief exploration, with the focus on Secure Asset Exchange and SmartContract. These two projects shared the same co-founder—Steve Ellis. Ellis also graduated from NYU, earning a computer science degree in 2010, making him Nazarov's junior. After graduation, he worked as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, focusing on payment automation systems—a lineage that connects to the later oracle network capable of automatic settlement and automatic payment triggering. In 2014, Ellis and Nazarov hit it off, with one taking the CTO role for technology and the other as CEO, a division of labor that continues to this day.

A DeFi Prototype That Came Too Early

If the two ventures were their children, then the elder, Secure Asset Exchange, was in some ways a classic case of an idea that arrived too early, before the market was ready. But understanding Secure Asset Exchange helps you better understand Nazarov's later thinking, as well as RWA and DeFi.

In 2014, Ethereum was still in Vitalik's conception and preparation stage (officially launched in 2015), and the market had a relatively similar chain called Nxt. Secure Asset Exchange's goal was to help users buy digital assets on the Nxt chain directly with their BTC, without downloading the Nxt client. Furthermore, these assets could be designed as on-chain contracts resembling "crypto debt," "crypto equity," or other automated yield 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; but in 2014, it faced an awkward problem: there weren't enough high-quality on-chain assets themselves, and users were better off just holding BTC. Secondly, the Nxt ecosystem itself was still too early, with insufficient developers and users to form network effects. Due to multiple overlapping reasons, in early 2016, Secure Asset Exchange, which had lasted about a year and a half, announced its shutdown.

The Real Problem: How to Connect Data Well

Compared to Secure Asset Exchange, SmartContract, founded a few months later, seemed to have found the right direction from the start. It secured a seed round led by Underscore VC with participation from Data Collective, enough to sustain the team's operations for a long time.

At the time, Ellis and Nazarov had already begun writing smart contracts for large financial institutions and insurance companies, but 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.

But the underlying technology of oracles is largely similar, so how could they earn the trust of banks? Their solution: enter competitions and win the hardest ticket to the traditional financial world. In 2016, SmartContract participated in the Industry Challenge hosted by Innotribe under SWIFT—a public competition for fintech companies across the industry, focused on how to use blockchain to transform the lifecycle management of securities.

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

The following year, at the 2017 Sibos conference, Nazarov led the team again for a further live demonstration: using oracles to bring external LIBOR interest rate data into a smart contract, automatically calculating the interest on a bond, then generating an ISO 20022-compliant message and sending settlement instructions through the SWIFT network. This is considered the starting point of the Chainlink-SWIFT partnership. In the years since, Nazarov has continued to participate in Sibos, and Chainlink has gradually become one of the most important partners in the banking industry.

One could even say that if the crypto industry were someday proven to be a false proposition, the type of service Chainlink provides would still be needed by large financial institutions—because it solves not only the problem of on-chain and off-chain information exchange but also accelerates settlement speed. Traditional settlement requires confirmation through multiple intermediaries: the originating bank, custodian bank, clearinghouse, counterparty custodian bank, and counterparty bank, each maintaining its own records, reconciliation, and confirmation, with many steps processed only in batches during fixed weekday hours. With an oracle network, multiple nodes can read and cross-verify data simultaneously, and once confirmed, push settlement instructions concurrently, no longer constrained by bank working hours.

Today, Chainlink has established public partnerships with SWIFT, DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation), Euroclear (one of Europe's largest securities infrastructures), Clearstream (a securities infrastructure under Deutsche Börse), Citibank, JPMorgan, and a host of other major financial institutions.

Afterword

After writing about the first half of Nazarov's journey, what inspires me most is not how important the concept of "oracles" is, but that the path he chose is, to a large extent, replicable:

First, enter a sufficiently good environment—whether a school, a company, or a community. Do your current work well, earn recognition, and from that gain mentors willing to lend a hand, then leverage that to move to a bigger platform.

In this process, keep accumulating and keep experimenting. Even if, like ExistLocal, QED Capital, CryptaMail, and Secure Asset Exchange, you pay a lot of "tuition," you can still find the market's real needs and the direction you're willing to commit to.

Once the direction is found, earn the industry's ticket through real competitions, then persist for a decade, solving practitioners' real problems rather than spending energy on storytelling, concept creation, and marketing.

This is probably why I always retain trust in the industry. Even with many naysayers and many muddling through, 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.