Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov will appear in three separate sessions at Sibos 2026, the annual conference run by SWIFT, the member-owned cooperative whose messaging network banks worldwide use to exchange cross-border payment instructions. Sibos serves as the financial industry's largest gathering, drawing attendees from commercial banks, central banks, and financial technology firms. This year's event takes place from September 28 through October 1 at the Miami Beach Convention Center under the theme "Digital finance for AI-driven economies" — a framing that runs directly through the subjects of Nazarov's scheduled appearances.

Three Sessions Spanning the Conference

Nazarov's appearances cover the full arc of the program, from the conference's opening day to its final one. On September 28, he joins a discussion titled "Building Global Digital Asset Markets," which will focus on how tokenized assets can function across jurisdictions and financial systems. On September 30, he appears in "Future of Value: Part Two, When Money Becomes Intelligent," a session exploring how programmable money and artificial intelligence intersect — one of the program slots that engage the event's AI theme head-on. He then leads a workshop on October 1 centered on creating a trust layer for interoperable global finance.

Nazarov will not be the only Chainlink representative at the event. Ryan Lovell, also from Chainlink, is scheduled to present on September 30 about AI's ability to sustain payment systems under extreme stress, a subject squarely within the conference's AI focus. In total, the broader conference features more than 500 speakers across over 250 sessions.

Chainlink's Deepening Ties to Traditional Finance

This is not Chainlink's first appearance at Sibos. The company has previously participated in discussions alongside SWIFT and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the post-trade market infrastructure that provides clearing and settlement services for U.S. securities markets, touching on corporate action processing and asset tokenization.

One of Chainlink's most ambitious current projects is Project Pangea, a consortium of more than 50 banks working toward T+0 atomic settlement for cross-border foreign exchange — completing settlement on the same day a trade executes rather than over the multi-day cycles typical of conventional cross-border transactions. The global FX market processes over $7 trillion in daily volume. Chainlink reports that over $340 billion in real-world assets — blockchain representations of traditional financial instruments — are currently represented on-chain, while projections cited by the company suggest the tokenized asset market could reach somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion by 2030.

Why Institutions Keep Showing Up

Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) is designed to function as a universal translator between different blockchain networks and legacy financial systems. AI systems need reliable, tamper-proof data to function properly in financial contexts, and oracles—the mechanism Chainlink pioneered—are one of the few existing solutions for providing that kind of verified data on-chain.

With the conference theme explicitly centered on AI-driven economies, the infrastructure questions these tools address — verified data delivery and connectivity between financial systems — sit alongside tokenization and programmable money at the center of the agenda.