BNP Paribas exec says the bank needs an abstraction layer to reach multiple blockchains

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At Sibos 2026, BNP Paribas' Wayne Hughes described a multi-chain connectivity problem that Chainlink is pitching tools to solve

Mon 9 Nov 2026 · 14:47 EST · 3 min read

In Crypto

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One of Europe’s biggest banks has a plumbing problem, and it said so on stage.

Wayne Hughes, an executive at BNP Paribas, told the audience at Sibos 2026 that the bank needs an abstraction layer so its many internal platforms can connect with many different blockchains. Chainlink highlighted his remarks in a November 9, 2026 announcement, framing them as evidence that big banks are moving past tokenization experiments and into the less glamorous work of making systems talk to each other.

“We’ve got a lot of different platforms that need to talk to a lot of different blockchains, so that abstraction layer is quite critical.” – Wayne Hughes, BNP Paribas

What was said at Sibos

Sibos 2026 ran in Miami from late September to early October. The conference is the annual gathering for the global payments and banking crowd, and this year’s agenda leaned on interoperability and collateral mobility.

Panels on tokenized assets and cross-chain settlement included representatives from BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank. Chainlink had a strong presence throughout, which makes sense given that cross-chain connectivity is its core pitch to institutions.

Hughes’ point comes down to scale and fragmentation. A bank like BNP Paribas does not run one system. It runs many, built for different business lines, and the blockchain world is not converging on a single network either.

Chainlink’s pitch and BNP Paribas’ own work

Chainlink used the conference to present CCIP 2.0 and Fulcrum. The company positions both products as ways to help institutions move tokenized workflows from pilot projects into full production.

BNP Paribas has not been waiting on the sidelines. The bank has pursued tokenization projects including money market fund shares issued on a public blockchain with permissioned access.

The bank is also developing an initiative called DAWN, aimed at connecting to multiple blockchains. In other words, BNP Paribas is already building toward the multi-chain setup Hughes described, which gives his abstraction layer comment some practical weight.

What was not disclosed is just as notable. No specific timelines or deal values were shared regarding any integration between BNP Paribas and Chainlink, and no performance metrics accompanied the discussions.

Why the connectivity question keeps coming up

Tokenization, the process of representing assets like fund shares or bonds as tokens on a blockchain, has become a fixture on bank conference agendas. The harder question has always been what happens after the token exists.

If a tokenized fund sits on one chain and the collateral needed to settle a trade sits on another, the asset is only as useful as the bridge between them. That is why Sibos sessions focused on collateral mobility and cross-chain settlement rather than just issuance.

What this means

For Chainlink, the value of comments like Hughes’ is mostly about positioning. When a large bank executive publicly describes the exact problem your product claims to solve, that is useful validation, even without a deal attached.

The competitive picture is less settled. BNP Paribas is building DAWN in-house, and nothing in the Sibos discussions confirms that Chainlink tooling will sit inside it.

The things worth watching are fairly specific. Look for whether DAWN gets a public rollout schedule, whether BNP Paribas names technology providers for its multi-chain connectivity, and whether Chainlink’s CCIP 2.0 and Fulcrum show up in production deployments rather than conference demos.

Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.