Sergey Nazarov compares Chainlink’s CRE to Ethereum’s early breakthrough

Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said the recently launched Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) could have a transformative effect on the blockchain industry, comparing its potential to the impact of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

In a YouTube video published on Monday by Chainlink, Nazarov said the CRE “can have the same impact that the EVM had on the blockchain industry.” The EVM, introduced by Ethereum, enabled Turing-complete smart contracts, which significantly reduced the development time from months to weeks by allowing developers to use loops and state-based operations — capabilities unavailable in Bitcoin Script.

Nazarov said the smart contract development ecosystem is complex and has become a web of interconnected on and offchain systems. Chainlink’s CRE, he said, adds a layer of abstraction that makes managing this complexity much easier for developers.

“With the CRE, from our own personal experience, building on top of it, those months get reduced down to weeks or days,” he said.

CRE development infographic. Source: ChainlinkRelated: Blockchain compliance tools can slash TradFi costs: Chainlink co-founder

What is the CRE?

Chainlink introduced the CRE at the end of October 2024, describing it as a way to “deploy code directly on the Chainlink Platform for building and composing capabilities, removing the need to add Chainlink-specific code to their onchain contracts.” As Cointelegraph reported at the time, CRE also enables the connection of traditional financial architecture, payment systems and legacy institutions with blockchain protocols and smart contracts.

Effectively, CRE functions like an operating system for the Chainlink network. It runs “workflows” composed of Chainlink services and pulls together price feeds, crosschain messaging, external application programming interfaces (API), zero-knowledge proofs and compliance checks.

Related: Chainlink reveals compliance standard, targets $100T institutional crypto flows

How to build on CRE?

Developers are expected to write in JavaScript, TypeScript or Go, and all actions (reading the blockchain, fetching data from an API, consensus and writing onchain) are handled by Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network (DON).

The CRE orchestrates the actions of all those DONs, ensuring that it reaches cryptographic consensus and returns the results to a smart contract independently of the chain that it sits on.

The architecture is designed to work across multiple chains and includes native support for confidential computing and zero-knowledge proofs.

The statements follow mid-June reports that Chainlink, JPMorgan’s Kinexys, and Ondo Finance completed a crosschain delivery versus payment settlement between a permissioned payment network and a public testnet relying on the CRE.

Earlier this month, Nelli Zaltsman, head of blockchain payments innovation at JPMorgan’s Kinexys, also said while speaking alongside Nazarov that the bank is pushing to merge institutional-grade payments infrastructure with emerging onchain assets.

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