Chainlink – Connecting Wall Street to Web3
About this episode
Charlie Durkin discusses his transition from Citigroup to Chainlink Labs and the role of Chainlink in connecting traditional finance with blockchain technology.
Charlie Durkin is Principal Solutions Lead at Chainlink Labs, where he works with the world's largest banks, asset managers, and market infrastructures on bringing capital markets onchain. A decade at Citigroup – five years in investment banking and debt capital markets, then five more in product management building the actual rails – gives him a grounded view of the gap between TradFi reality and crypto's promises, and what it will take to close it. Why you should listen Charlie's path from Citi's product team to Chainlink is the perfect frame for this conversation. He's lived inside the legacy plumbing of capital markets and now spends his days helping institutions migrate workflows to blockchain rails without throwing out the existing infrastructure they're built on. His explanation of Chainlink itself is refreshingly concrete: not a competing L1, but the middleware connecting blockchains to each other and to the offchain world – an oracle network at its core, expanded into a full orchestration layer via the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE). The "give us an API and we'll connect you securely to the blockchain ecosystem" framing is exactly how Chainlink keeps showing up in…
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