Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov says banks are building their own tokenized deposit chains

Banks spent years treating blockchain like a science project in the basement. Now, according to Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, many of them are building their own tokenized deposit chains. Nazarov made that point at Sibos 2026, the annual banking conference held from September 28 to October 1 in Miami Beach. The important question is no longer whether banks will put deposits onchain. It is how all those separate chains will talk to each other. What Nazarov told the Sibos crowd Nazarov appeared on at least three panel sessions during the event. His fellow panelists included representatives from DTCC, J.P. Morgan and Microsoft. The sessions covered three broad themes. One was how global digital asset markets are evolving. Another paired “intelligent money” with AI, and a third looked at building a trust layer for interoperable finance. His core argument was about demand. Institutions increasingly need infrastructure that can manage many blockchain environments at once, rather than betting everything on a single network. Nazarov positioned Chainlink’s tools as the answer to that problem. Two products took center stage: the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and the Cha...