Event organizer Chainlink, a blockchain infrastructure company, said 2,000 people attended the two-day conference which started on Wednesday at the Kerry Hotel in Hung Hom. SmartCon is bigger this year than in the past, according to the company.
Joseph Chan Ho-lim, Undersecretary for Financial Services and Treasury, delivered the keynote speech to kick off the event, highlighting Hong Kong’s role as a hub for virtual assets, although some of the The momentum of that effort appears to be slowing this year.
“Hong Kong is in a unique position to link virtual assets with traditional financial instruments,” Chan said. “I am pleased to see that Chainlink’s vision and technology – particularly the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, CCIP – have made remarkable progress in being adopted across the mainstream financial world.”
Chainlink is working to integrate its technology into the back end of what it sees as the future of blockchain-based finance. It has worked for several years with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) to enable blockchain transactions on the dominant global financial messaging network. Banks will be able to launch trials of digital asset transactions through Swift starting next year, the organization announced this month.
“We’ve made a lot of progress integrating existing payment flows like Swift into blockchain events, and we’ve made a lot of progress getting central banks more comfortable interconnecting their chains,” said Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink. la Poste on the sidelines of the event. “I think ultimately it will be a mix of interconnected central bank chains and existing payment systems like Swift interoperating with each of them.”
