ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

Krum Pashov, founder and CEO of Pashov Audit Group, on how AI has reshaped Web3 security in 2026. With audit contests drying up, he argues that bug bounties are now the best permissionless path into the field, makes the case for specialising in a niche such as Bitcoin and BTCFi security, and shows how Pashov's free, open-source Solidity Auditor skill found 11 of the 13 high-severity bugs from a 2025 audit contest in under an hour. The talk closes with audience questions on what AI will and will not automate, and how the security researcher's job is changing. Keynote at ETHSofia 2026, 24 September 2026, Sofia Tech Park, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speaker ▸ Krum Pashov, CEO, Pashov Audit Group Krum or "pashov", is Founder & CEO of Pashov Audit Group, protected over $100B of funds with 400+ security audits. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pashov X: https://x.com/pashov Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Web3 security in 2026: what changed 02:11 Why bug bounties are the place to be 06:26 Freelance, full-time or your own firm 07:23 Go niche: the Bitcoin and BTCFi opportunity 10:46 Build your own AI auditing agent 12:17 Solidity Auditor V4: 11 of 13 high-severity bugs in an hour 16:01 Fork the open-source skills and build on them 18:12 Will AI replace security researchers? 20:15 Q&A: What AI will and will not automate 21:52 Q&A: How the daily job is changing 24:07 Q&A: Why Krum started Pashov Audit Group 25:38 Q&A: How an audit firm makes money 26:46 Q&A: Should we worry about AI-driven threats? 28:07 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org

ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

With Klara Kovacevic (ChainSecurity, moderator), Krum Pashov (Pashov Audit Group), Jonathan Riss (CertiK) and Josef Gattermayer (ack3). Moderated by Klara Kovacevic of ChainSecurity, this panel asks what AI is actually changing in smart contract security. Josef Gattermayer says ack3's analysis found that 97% of hacks on audited protocols happened outside the audited scope, in infrastructure and off-chain components, and that black hats adopted AI faster than white hats. Krum Pashov and Josef discuss continuous monitoring as a business, how to benchmark AI auditing tools against a plain frontier-model prompt, and why recall, token spend and false positives must be balanced. Jonathan Riss of CertiK covers AI-assisted data aggregation and physical security risks, and audience questions address formal verification, zero-days versus social engineering, and auditor accountability. Panel at ETHSofia 2026, 24 September 2026, Sofia Tech Park, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speakers ▸ Klara Kovacevic, Ecosystem Lead, ChainSecurity (moderator) Klara is with ChainSecurity, the team auditing major protocols like Circle, Sky, Aave, and Curve. With experience in both big tech and Web3, she’s here to ask the right questions and keep things interesting. She’s also a board member at Alice in Blockchains, a crypto education nonprofit. X: https://x.com/klarakova ▸ Krum Pashov, CEO, Pashov Audit Group Krum or "pashov", is Founder & CEO of Pashov Audit Group, protected over $100B of funds with 400+ security audits. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pashov X: https://x.com/pashov ▸ Jonathan Riss, Blockchain Intelligence Analyst, CertiK As an Blockchain Intelligence Analyst at CertiK, Jonathan specializes in tracking illicit flows and de-anonymizing malicious actors. He documents complex fraud operations to produce the actionable intelligence necessary to protect the web3 landscape. His mission is to decode the latest threat vectors to help builders and users navigate a safer decentralized future. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanriss X: https://x.com/Jonathan_Riss_ ▸ Josef Gattermayer, Founder, ack3 Josef Gattermayer is the founder of ack3 (prev. Ackee Blockchain) - team securing $180B+ in TVL for Lido, Aave, and Safe. The auditors who created the open-source Wake framework. Ph.D. and Assistant Professor teaching blockchain security at Czech Technical University in Prague. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josefgattermayer X: https://x.com/jgattermayer Chapters 00:00 Introduction 01:02 Day-to-day roles and how AI changed them 06:18 Has AI made the industry more or less secure? 07:45 97% of hacks happened outside the audited scope 09:38 Continuous monitoring as a business 12:27 Audit firms become product companies 15:16 Building a great AI auditing harness 17:06 Recall, token spend and false positives 19:45 AI, data leaks and physical security 23:09 Training the next generation of auditors 25:27 What makes an exceptional auditor 30:33 Q&A: Will formal verification replace audits? 33:23 Q&A: Will AI exploit zero-days or humans? 36:07 Q&A: Holding auditors accountable 38:45 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org

ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

Ivan Goychev of Sofia Municipality recalls his start as a software engineer in fintech, from portfolio management software for private equity, with one project for Goldman Sachs, to an algorithmic trading start-up that traded on news sentiment. He cites FinAnalytica, LimeChain, Nexo and Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev as proof of Bulgarian talent on the global stage. He presents the city as a platform for builders, offering open data, real use cases, marketing and 1.3 million residents as potential clients, while leaving laws and regulation to the national government and the European Parliament. He floats tokenising city assets and paying citizens in real time for micro-jobs that improve their neighbourhoods, and invites companies to partner with the municipality. Official Opening at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speaker ▸ Ivan Goychev, Deputy Mayor for Digitalisation and Information Systems Ivan Goychev, Deputy Mayor for Digitalisation of Sofia, has 25 years of leadership experience, including managing global teams at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and serving as CTO of FinTech, TravelTech and ConstructionTech startups. He also supports open-source initiatives like Podkrepi.bg. LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/igoychev Chapters 00:00 From fintech engineer to deputy mayor 01:47 Bulgarian fintech and blockchain talent 03:12 The city as a platform: open data and 1.3 million clients 04:02 Tokenising city assets and micro-jobs 05:06 An invitation to partner with Sofia Municipality 06:20 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org

ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

Martin Leinweber of MarketVector Indexes draws on index data back to 2015 and more than 2,300 tokens to argue that crypto rewards size, not speculation. The top ten coins hold roughly 90% of market cap, there is no small-cap premium, and a liquid micro-cap basket lost about 19% a year. He shows which coins held up in both bull and bear markets, why privacy is a strong theme, and why DeFi, at 2% of market cap but 65% of on-chain fees, looks mispriced. He expects stablecoins, tokenisation and AI agents to drive a fundamentals-led altcoin cycle, and explains the fees-and-users methodology behind his Token Terminal index. Keynote at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speaker ▸ Martin Leinweber, CFA, Head of Digital Asset Research and Strategy, MarketVector Indexes Martin Leinweber leads digital asset research at MarketVector Indexes, developing index products and institutional research, and serving as the firm's primary voice on crypto markets globally. He brings nearly two decades of portfolio management experience across equities, fixed income, and alternatives. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-leinweber-cfa-7758b012b Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:19 Twelve years of data on 2,300 tokens 01:03 Crypto is concentrated: the top 10 hold 90% 02:13 No size premium in crypto 03:21 Micro caps: the pump and dump that works on paper 04:26 The most consistent coins in bull and bear markets 06:54 Screening for relative strength: the privacy theme 09:01 What the leaders share: revenue and users 10:02 On-chain fundamentals: DeFi is 2% of cap, 65% of fees 11:19 Stablecoins, tokenisation and AI agents 13:49 The Token Terminal top 10 index 15:45 Prediction: a fundamentals-driven altcoin cycle 17:30 Q&A: The index methodology 19:46 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Alex McFarlane, CEO of Keyring Network, introduces a disciplined risk methodology for tokenised assets in DeFi by drawing on lessons from clearing houses, bank regulation, derivatives, and past financial failures. He explains why credentials, ratings, historical performance, and apparently robust models cannot substitute for independent controls. Examples including AIG, Long-Term Capital Management, Lehman Brothers, and fragile clearing assumptions show how incentives, concentration, and model error can turn accepted practices into systemic risk. He traces the modern clearing framework through the Bank for International Settlements and standardized initial margin models, then asks which lessons should transfer to permissionless markets. Historical institutions accumulated rules after repeated crises, but rules can fail when the people setting ratings, collateral assumptions, or insurance prices benefit from optimistic outcomes. McFarlane uses these examples to show why transparency alone does not remove conflicts. A protocol can publish every parameter and still be unsafe if its governance process rewards the wrong behavior. McFarlane focuses on practical safeguards for DeFi lending and tokenized markets: separate parameter setting from commercial pressure, test models outside the data used to calibrate them, examine tail events, and run transparent scenario analysis. He warns that insiders, issuers, or large counterparties may push for higher loan-to-value ratios that benefit them while shifting risk to a protocol. The takeaway is a governance-first approach in which assumptions are challenged, conflicts are visible, and risk parameters are designed for unfamiliar market conditions, not merely optimized to explain the past. The methodology emphasizes independent validation, robust data, and explicit limits on who can influence risk settings. Models should be calibrated on one period and challenged against separate market conditions. McFarlane cites scenario analysis around FTX, a major counterparty collapse, and shocks to DeFi rates, while arguing that macro stress such as a global financial crisis or private-credit selloff deserves more attention. 00:00 Introduction and Risk Quant Background 00:40 DeFi Lending as Automated Clearing 01:31 How Lending Risk Parameters Are Set 02:52 Three Centuries of Clearing Houses 03:28 BIS and Standard Initial Margin Models 04:06 Setting Haircuts for Different Assets 04:23 Applying TradFi Models to Tokenized Assets 04:44 When Risk Takers Mark Their Own Work 05:13 AIG, Lehman, and Financial Failures 05:36 How Clearing Houses Managed Lehman 06:07 Silicon Valley Bank and DeFi Stress 06:39 The Clearing House Default Waterfall 07:38 How Aave Followed the BIS Model 07:56 Fragility, Robustness, and Tail Events 08:18 The Meaning of Antifragility 09:18 Evaluating Proprietary Risk Models 09:42 Why Track Record Is Not Proof 10:08 Long-Term Capital Management Failure 10:48 Independent Validation After 2008 11:38 Monte Carlo Models and In-Sample Data 12:27 Testing Models on Unseen Conditions 12:53 Verify Instead of Trusting Models 14:10 Questions Before Depositing in DeFi 15:15 Commercial Pressure on LTV Settings 16:14 High LTVs and Counterparty Conflicts 16:52 Why Independent Parameters Matter 17:39 Conflicts From Skin in the Game 17:57 Scenario Analysis for Protocol Failures 18:24 Macro Risk and Private Credit Stress 19:07 Open Risk Methodology for Tokenized Assets 19:59 Closing Thanks and Takeaways _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Alex McFarlane X: https://x.com/flipdazed ✅ Follow Keyring Network X: https://x.com/KeyringNetwork ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Haun Ventures General Partner Diogo Mónica joins ETHGlobal Co-Founder and CEO Kartik Talwar to discuss crypto’s progression from secure custody to full capital-markets infrastructure. Drawing on his experience co-founding Anchorage, Mónica explains why the company paired advanced security with a federal banking framework and how regulated institutions compound trust, capital, and operating capability over time. The conversation asks where crypto-native value accrues as traditional financial firms adopt blockchain technology and whether banks, infrastructure providers, or open protocols will capture the next phase of growth. Mónica explains that Anchorage was designed around two requirements that institutional customers could not separate: cryptographic security and a regulatory structure they understood. Becoming a federally chartered bank created long-term obligations but also allowed the company to compound trust, capital, products, and customer relationships. They explore product ideas at the intersection of crypto, artificial intelligence, payments, and verifiable digital activity. AI systems create new demand for cryptographically verifiable records of model behavior, reasoning, and outputs, even if many experiments serve narrow markets before reaching scale. Mónica also reflects on moving from operator to investor and on evaluating businesses across the ecosystem. His advice to founders is durable and category-agnostic: work on a real problem, understand the customer, keep experimenting through difficult cycles, and make something people want. Infrastructure succeeds when it converts technical possibility into a product institutions or users repeatedly choose. The discussion then turns to emerging infrastructure that may create new demand. Mónica argues that model behavior and outputs can be recorded in indelible ledgers with cryptographic signatures, and that zero-knowledge proofs are becoming efficient enough to verify computation. The conversation also points to Cloudflare’s work on bringing payment mechanisms and verification into the network stack. 00:00 Introduction to Diogo Mónica 01:12 From Anchorage Founder to Investor 01:39 Balancing Investing and Operating 02:17 Professionalizing Angel Investing 02:59 Business Curiosity Beyond Anchorage 03:15 The Long Path to a Federal Charter 04:12 Anchorage and the Trust Bank Model 04:29 New Tailwinds for Modern Banks 05:07 The Cost of Regulatory Resistance 05:45 Security, Regulation, and Compounding 06:34 Crypto Extends Traditional Finance 06:59 Where Financial Value Accrues 07:43 Self-Custodial Financial Products 08:14 Faster Access to Financial Licenses 08:34 Crypto Neobanks and Card Products 09:47 Stablecoins Replace Whitelists 11:12 Libra and New Currency Experiments 12:02 Why Unlikely Experiments Are Worth Trying 12:18 Consortium Coins for Commerce 13:13 Distribution as Part of Product Design 13:48 Open Areas in Financial Infrastructure 15:09 Cryptographic Records for AI Models 15:53 Zero-Knowledge Proofs for AI Outputs 16:44 Economic Incentives for Intelligent Agents 18:07 Verifying the Internet Stack 18:28 Cloudflare and Network-Level Payments 19:13 What Founders Ask Investors 20:14 Security and the Basics of Building 20:56 Advice Through Difficult Market Cycles 21:36 Build Companies, Not Crypto Projects 22:36 Stablecoin Neobanks and Dollar Access 22:54 From Dollars to Tokenized Stocks 23:27 Make Something People Want _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Haun Ventures X: https://x.com/HaunVentures ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Angelo Min, CEO of Lighthouse, describes the “ontology gap” that appears when raw onchain data is mistaken for an understandable picture of an asset. A wallet may show token balances, names, icons, and prices, yet still conceal the chain of vaults, curators, lending markets, collateral, and counterparties behind a position. For asset managers and risk teams, those missing relationships determine what the investment actually is, how it behaves, where risk accumulates, and how quickly liquidity can be accessed. Using a portfolio example, Min shows how an ERC-20 balance can represent a claim on a Morpho vault curated by another organization, which then supplies capital to lending markets backed by separate collateral. Each layer changes the economic exposure. A token label cannot reveal who controls the vault, its exit conditions, pricing inputs, underlying fees, collateral exposure, or the behavior of the underlying strategy. Without a shared model for those relationships, analysts repeatedly reconstruct the same context and may still reach inconsistent conclusions. Min separates the problem into taxonomy, agreeing on what an entity is, and ontology, mapping how protocols, assets, contracts, and service providers relate to one another. Even a shared taxonomy is not enough unless the resulting information can be collected, maintained, and applied to a concrete asset-management or due-diligence task. He argues that a new generation of knowledge-graph products can combine onchain records with structured context, making complex DeFi positions legible. The outcome is better collaboration, more reliable analysis, and infrastructure capable of supporting asset-management decisions. He proposes data systems that answer three connected questions: what an entity is, how it works, and how it should be used for a specific task. Taxonomy supplies consistent categories, ontology maps dependencies and relationships, and applications turn that structure into research, due diligence, portfolio monitoring, and action. Min points to existing crypto data products as partial building blocks, then argues that a new generation should unite taxonomy, ontology, and usable applications for asset managers and agents. 00:00 Introduction and Lighthouse Background 00:32 Onchain Data for Asset Managers 01:04 A Four-Million-Dollar Deposit Story 01:48 Nameless Tokens in Etherscan 02:14 Why Token Labels Are Not Enough 03:04 Interpreting Tokens as Vault Positions 03:47 What DeFi Interfaces Still Hide 04:16 Mapping a Morpho Vault Knowledge Graph 04:43 Risk Lives Between Connected Entities 05:07 XUSD Losses Socialized Across Depositors 05:34 Depositing After a Protocol Collapse 06:06 Turning Onchain Data Into Meaning 06:48 Taxonomy, Ontology, and Actionable Data 07:36 Comparing Two Similar Vaults 07:56 Different Strategies Behind One Label 08:42 Liquidity and Redemption Differences 09:03 The Cost of Rebuilding Context 09:49 Lessons From TradFi Taxonomy 10:31 Why Taxonomy Alone Is Insufficient 11:21 Mapping Financial Relationships 13:10 Existing Crypto Data Products 14:49 A New Generation of Knowledge Graphs 15:14 Lighthouse for Onchain Asset Managers 16:08 Tracking Customer Assets in One App 17:02 Closing the Onchain Ontology Gap _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Angelo Min X: https://x.com/angelomint ✅ Follow Lighthouse X: https://x.com/LighthouseOne_ ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Marc Tillement, Director at Pyth Network, explains how market data became a concentrated, roughly $50 billion industry and why open infrastructure can make prices more accessible. Traditional exchanges earn substantial revenue selling data that trading firms themselves help create, leaving applications to pay high recurring fees for fragmented feeds. Pyth reverses that model by enabling trading firms and other first-party sources to contribute prices directly to a network that can publish them across crypto and traditional-asset markets. Tillement describes a market structure in which exchanges sell expensive feeds back to the firms and applications that depend on them. A small group of vendors captures most industry revenue, applications face expensive and fragmented access, and global products must integrate different sources for equities, commodities, foreign exchange, and crypto. Pyth recruits trading firms that generate prices through their own activity and lets them publish those observations directly, creating a first-party model rather than purchasing and reselling one consolidated feed. Tillement describes how lower-cost, high-frequency data supports trading venues, DeFi protocols, fintech applications, prediction markets, and derivatives. The network emphasizes publisher quality, broad asset coverage, and products that can serve customers who previously relied on several vendors. New feeds include international equities and specialized datasets that are difficult to reconstruct from public information. He argues that continuous, global price access is part of finance’s shift toward 24/7 markets: reliable data reduces application costs, expands the assets developers can offer, and helps both onchain and offchain products settle against a common view of value. Trust comes from the quality, diversity, and track record of publishers, plus the economic activity secured by the network. Pyth initially concentrated on trading because continuous markets generate large volumes and require timely settlement data. The network is expanding into Asian equities, indices, and specialized feeds while also introducing products for customers that need datasets Pyth cannot produce itself. 00:00 Introduction to Pyth Market Data 00:48 Why the Market Data Industry Can Change 01:44 The Cost of Traditional Market Data 02:10 A Fifty-Billion-Dollar Industry 02:42 Why Pyth Redesigned Market Data 03:26 Always-On and Programmable Prices 04:01 Pyth as Spotify for Financial Data 04:57 Trading Firms Publish First-Party Prices 05:39 Three Thousand Assets in One Network 06:16 One API Across Global Asset Classes 06:57 Equity Data for Onchain Applications 07:39 Cutting Fintech Data Costs 08:22 Exclusive Data From Trading Firms 08:59 Cryptographic Proof for Every Feed 09:30 Why Pyth Focused on Trading 10:15 Fast Data for Equity Trading 11:28 Attracting Institutional Publishers 12:31 Pyth Pro and Expanding Data Coverage 12:56 Launching Asian Equity Feeds 13:37 Third-Party Data Through One API 14:09 Pyth Indices for Onchain Markets 14:38 A Full-Service Market Data Platform 15:54 Prediction Markets and Derivatives 16:46 Growth Beyond Crypto Price Feeds 17:58 Always-On Markets Without Holidays 18:21 Commodity, Equity, and FX Indices 19:54 Closing Vision for Accessible Prices _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Marc Tillement X: https://x.com/KemarTiti ✅ Follow Pyth Network X: https://x.com/PythNetwork ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Julien Bouteloup, Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Stake Capital CEO Julien Bouteloup and ETHGlobal Co-Founder and CEO Kartik Talwar examine how DeFi must change as institutions pursue onchain yield. Bouteloup argues that large financial firms are motivated by profit, market share, and access to new customers more than decentralization narratives. Adoption therefore depends on products that satisfy institutional requirements for confidentiality, risk controls, insurance, and predictable execution while still using open networks. The conversation also contrasts innovation incentives in the United States, Europe, and state-led markets. Bouteloup argues that the institutional narrative must begin with incentives. Banks and asset managers will use decentralized infrastructure when it lowers costs, increases margins, opens markets, or creates differentiated products. Public transparency may help, but it can also expose positions and trading intent. Privacy, KYC, AML, isolated liquidity, insurance, and compliance controls therefore become product requirements rather than compromises added after adoption. They distinguish sustainable “real yield” from temporary token incentives and discuss how higher risk-free rates reset investor expectations. A DeFi product offering seven percent may no longer compensate users for smart-contract, liquidity, or counterparty risk; differentiated strategies may need privacy, exotic yield, or stronger protection. Extremely high returns can exist during ecosystem subsidy cycles, but scalability and durability remain uncertain. For builders, the advice is to solve a specific problem, create something genuinely different, and prioritize distribution. Institutional capital will not arrive simply because infrastructure is onchain, it will follow products that deliver clear value with credible risk management. The yield discussion separates returns generated by real economic activity from emissions funded to attract temporary liquidity. Higher government rates create a baseline, so DeFi strategies must justify each additional layer of smart-contract, counterparty, liquidity, and product risk. Bouteloup sees opportunity in specialized or exotic yield, but warns that headline returns do not automatically scale to institutional ticket sizes. 00:00 Introduction to the DeFi Fireside Chat 00:25 Seven Years of DeFi Experience 01:11 How DeFi Has Evolved 02:01 TradFi Uses the Tools DeFi Built 02:39 What Institutions Actually Want 03:11 Profit, Market Share, and Customers 04:27 US Distribution Versus European Rules 05:35 State-Led Innovation in Asia 07:45 The Maturing DeFi Protocol Layer 08:22 Risk Moves Into Products and Strategies 08:54 Robinhood Yield Built on Morpho 09:31 Insurance, Privacy, and Confidentiality 10:36 Private Versions of Existing Protocols 11:02 Choosing Different Levels of Privacy 11:26 Private Yield Through Existing Liquidity 12:21 KYC, AML, and Isolated Liquidity 12:59 Is Seven Percent Yield Sustainable 13:19 Real Yield From Lending and Borrowing 14:26 Exotic Yield and Higher Risk 15:13 Pricing Risk Above the Baseline Rate 16:28 Better Yield and UX for End Users 17:02 Can Forty to Eighty Percent Scale 17:37 Ecosystem Incentives and Liquidity 18:32 Consolidation Across Major Chains 19:13 Advice for New DeFi Builders 20:19 Distribution and Proprietary Data 20:45 Build Products That Solve Real Problems 21:27 Closing Advice and Final Thanks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Kartik Talwar opens Pragma Lisbon 2026 by explaining ETHGlobal’s two complementary formats: global hackathons for builders and focused Pragma summits for broader, forward-looking discussion. He describes Pragma as a single-day, single-track gathering built around executive speakers, accessible themes, and practical lessons rather than highly technical presentations. Kartik also shares the event’s scale, 330 attendees from 34 countries, and thanks the nine partners supporting the program. He explains why the name Pragma reflects a call toward pragmatism rather than the beginning of a developer journey. The program is intentionally designed so attendees do not need deep protocol knowledge to follow the strategic questions. Instead, founders and operators can compare lessons from the ecosystem, identify opportunities, and consider how earlier experiments can inform a more productive future. The event combines three fireside chats with eleven presentations in one continuous track. He previews the day’s 14 sessions, spanning institutional finance, tokenized-asset risk, onchain retail banking, data and accounting infrastructure, crosschain composability, liquidity efficiency, market data, ENS identity, smart-contract development, AI-agent payments, and the future of DeFi. The introduction gives attendees a map of the program and connects each talk to a larger question: how Ethereum can turn lessons from its past into safer products, stronger institutions, and more useful onchain experiences. The preview connects named speakers and projects to the day’s agenda. Marius Smith covers an institutional front door for Ethereum, Alex McFarlane addresses tokenized-asset risk, Joao Alves discusses onchain retail banking, and Angelo Min examines reliable onchain data. Later sessions cover the Ethereum Economic Zone, 1inch Aqua, Pyth market data, ENS identity, WalletConnect payments, Plank smart contracts, Frames agent payments, DeFi yield, and community building. Kartik closes by directing attendees to the full schedule and welcoming the first speaker. 00:00 Introduction and Pragma Lisbon Welcome 00:31 ETHGlobal Hackathons and Summits 00:47 Why the Event Is Called Pragma 01:11 Single-Day and Single-Track Format 01:26 Executive Speakers and Future Themes 02:06 An Accessible Program for Attendees 02:24 Three Fireside Chats and Eleven Talks 02:41 Attendees From Thirty-Four Countries 02:57 Recognizing the Nine Event Partners 03:15 Ethereum Institutional Finance Preview 03:32 DeFi Evolution and Institutional Risk 03:49 Tokenized Assets and Retail Banking 04:14 Onchain Data and Accounting Topics 04:36 Traditional Finance Fireside Preview 04:58 Ethereum Economic Zone and 1inch Aqua 05:17 Pyth Market Data and ENS Identity 05:39 WalletConnect Payments and Plank EVM 06:06 Agent Payments and DeFi Yield 06:25 Community Podcast and Final Agenda 06:43 Opening the First Pragma Talk _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/kartiktalwar ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar, Simona Pop

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

In a live HUMAN Protocol podcast recording, host Simona Pop interviews ETHGlobal Co-Founder and CEO Kartik Talwar about the invisible work behind a durable developer community. Talwar reflects on ETHGlobal’s history, its early Ethereum Foundation support, and the standards learned from organizing events at global scale. Community quality, he explains, depends on thousands of decisions that participants rarely see: reviewing every applicant, helping teams find the right environment, gathering feedback at high volume, and creating clear pathways from a first hackathon to a serious company. Pop asks how ETHGlobal defines quality when event size, application volume, and the surrounding market continue to change. Talwar describes maintaining a consistent bar by reviewing applicants individually and creating an environment where builders can compare themselves with exceptional peers. The conversation follows projects and people from early experiments through products that shaped the Ethereum ecosystem, showing how trusted communities compound over time. Talwar discusses staying close to builders, recognizing what “good” looks like, surviving uncertainty, and expanding without abandoning careful curation. He also considers open source, software-driven business infrastructure, and the falling cost of building every layer of a business, which creates new demands for developer platforms and community operators. The central lesson is that community is not an audience metric: it is ongoing operational labor that helps talented people meet, test ideas, learn faster, and continue building through changing market cycles. They also discuss the difficult years between visible successes. ETHGlobal benefited from early timing and Ethereum Foundation support, but endurance required careful curation, staying close to builders, and continuing to serve developers through difficult market cycles. 00:00 Introduction and Live HUMAN Podcast 01:43 Kartik Talwar’s Academic Background 03:57 From University to Open Source Software 04:45 Learning Startups at SV Angel 06:40 Learning What Great Founders Look Like 08:44 Why the Hackathon Format Matters 10:51 Giving Builders Access to New Technology 11:47 Hack the North and Practical Education 13:32 Feedback Loops for Developer Platforms 14:25 Measuring Time to First Project 15:30 Hackathon Feedback Improves Products 17:22 Giving Builders More of Thirty-Six Hours 18:20 When Local Nodes Took Hours to Sync 19:27 From Better Tooling to Better Products 20:46 CryptoKitties and the First NFTs 22:09 Gitcoin Founders Meet at a Hackathon 22:53 A MetaMask Bug Fixed in the Room 23:19 How 1inch Emerged From Hackathons 26:38 Building Through Every Bear Market 28:03 Reviewing Every ETHGlobal Applicant 29:17 Helping Builders Find Their Peers 29:38 Playing the Seven-Year Community Game 30:38 Showing Real Work During Bear Markets 33:05 Reviewing Every Project and Trend 35:00 Early Ethereum Foundation Support 37:20 Scaling Events After COVID 40:33 The Clash Between Ideals and Reality 42:05 Open Source and Community Compounding 42:36 Supporting Every Layer of a Business 45:01 The Opportunity in Crypto Infrastructure 46:18 Faster Experiments and Product Feedback 48:28 Patterns Across Hundreds of Companies 49:36 Open Source as a Community Model 50:01 Why Closed Ecosystems Backfire 51:42 Competing in the Same Room 53:04 Short-Term KPIs Create Silos 53:53 Long-Term Foundations Versus Easy Wins 55:01 Final Thanks and Podcast Sign-Off _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Simona Pop X: https://x.com/Sim_Pop ✅ Follow Human Protocol X: http://x.com/_humanprotocol ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Philippe Dumonet

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Plank EVM creator Philippe Dumonet presents Plank as a new smart-contract language designed to improve developer experience, security, and tooling. He argues that Solidity’s large, rigid language core and limited support for generics, metaprogramming, libraries, documentation, testing, and editor tooling create repeated “foot guns” throughout development. Slow or incomplete tooling is not merely an inconvenience: it increases review costs, delays features, and makes it harder for teams to build reusable safety patterns. Dumonet connects language design to the repeated failures he saw while auditing and supporting smart-contract teams. Projects lacked tests, documentation, reusable abstractions, or effective editor feedback, and those weaknesses made security reviews slower and more expensive. Solidity’s missing generics and metaprogramming capabilities also make it difficult to package safe patterns in libraries. Teams often repeat complex code or depend on compiler features that cannot be extended by ordinary developers. Plank takes the opposite approach by shrinking the core language and moving important capabilities into an extensible standard library. Dumonet compares this design with modern languages such as Rust, Zig, and Python, where a small core supports powerful reusable abstractions. The current compiler produces real EVM bytecode, supports features such as reusable encoding and EIP-712 patterns, and compiles much faster than Solidity in early tests. With version 0. 2 approaching, the project aims to give teams a practical path to safer contracts, richer tools, and a language that can evolve without continually expanding its compiler. Plank aims to make experimentation happen in libraries rather than inside an ever-growing compiler. A small core is easier to analyze, document, and support with static tools, while standard-library authors can add encoding, typed data, and domain-specific abstractions. Dumonet reports that the compiler already converts Plank into EVM bytecode and has shown major speed improvements in early testing. Version 0. 2 is intended to combine the language, tooling, and library model into something teams can begin using. The goal is a language ordinary developers can extend while reducing the burden placed on the compiler. 00:00 Introduction to Plank EVM 00:28 Five Years Building With Solidity 01:01 Developer and Auditor Friction 01:29 Repeated Footguns and Missing Tests 01:58 How Weak Tooling Raises Audit Costs 02:40 Solidity Extensibility Limits 03:00 Missing Generics and Metaprogramming 03:15 Security Problems in Basic Building Blocks 04:04 Slow Evolution of the Solidity Language 04:36 How Optimization Caused a Vulnerability 05:29 What the Solidity Compiler Contains 05:52 Comparing Rust, Zig, and Python 06:19 Moving Features Into Standard Libraries 07:12 Shrinking the Core With Plank 07:42 An Extensible Smart Contract Stack 08:28 Reusable EIP-712 Implementations 09:27 Compiler Speed and Gas Benchmarks 10:05 Plank Version 0.2 Roadmap 10:28 Next-Generation Compiler Improvements 10:49 Formally Verifying the Compiler 11:23 Closing Resources for Plank Developers _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Philippe Dumonet X: https://x.com/real_philogy ✅ Follow Plank EVM X: https://x.com/plankevm ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Leonardo Cascianelli from LI.FI introduces Composer, the project LI.FI is sponsoring for the hackathon, and walks through its interaction pattern. Composer is essentially a compiler that lets you execute complex DeFi strategies in one atomic transaction. You define a declarative flow in JSON (a simple embedded DSL), and Composer transforms it into something executable with one click on chain, pre-simulating everything so you learn your expected outputs, gas usage, and whether the transaction will fail. He motivates it with a common pain point: wanting to chain a swap, a vault deposit, and a stake or restake often ships as multiple transactions needing a coordinator to feed each output into the next. People try to solve this with multicall, but multicall does not give real data flow (you must hardcode intermediary values), so it is flaky. Composer instead defines the whole flow in one spot and passes intermediate values through automatically. Leo walks through a simple flow performing a swap and a zap (staking into a vault) using the TypeScript SDK, though any language that produces JSON works. He explains declaring inputs (like wrapped ETH as an ERC-20 resource via direct deposit from an EOA), the nodes that transform resources (swap WETH to USDC, then zap USDC to staked USDC), and optional guards that set minimum amounts. He covers the account model, where each signer (EOA, safe, or smart wallet) gets a dedicated auto-deployed user proxy that isolates approvals, with execution via delegate call to LI.FI's on-chain virtual machine. He details the simple API surface (the /compose endpoint plus manifest and zaps metadata routes, authenticated with an API key from the LI.FI portal), whose response returns the transaction to send yourself, required approvals, and dangling output resources. For the hackathon he previews new operations on a dedicated ETHGlobal deployment, including a cross-venue migration demo (moving an Aave position to Morpho in one flow) where flash loan complexity is abstracted away via materializers, supporting Aave V3, Balancer V2, Morpho, and ERC-3156 flash loan providers. He points agents to an llms.txt file and a repo of 30+ examples, invites AI, UX, and dev tooling builds, and closes with Q&A on targeting any smart contract, chain availability, and third-party contract whitelisting. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Meet Leo and Composer 00:42 How the Declarative JSON Flow Works 00:58 Pre-Simulating Outputs, Gas, and Failures 01:08 The Multi-Transaction Pain Point 01:36 Why Multicall Falls Short 02:03 The JSON Specification and Embedded DSL 02:30 A Simple Swap and Zap Flow 02:50 Declaring Your Inputs 03:18 The Nodes That Transform Resources 03:42 Using Guards for Minimum Amounts 04:04 The User Proxy Account Model 04:27 Execution via Delegate Call 04:37 The API Surface and Endpoints 04:51 Authentication and the API Key 05:21 What the Compilation Response Returns 05:41 Exposing Dangling Resources 05:53 New Operations for the Hackathon 06:11 The Cross-Venue Migration Demo 06:49 Abstracting Flash Loans With Materializers 07:09 The Three Beats of a Migration 07:30 The Preview Deployment and Supported Protocols 07:56 Pointing Your Agents to llms.txt 08:22 The Repo of 30+ Examples 08:44 What You Can Build With Composer 09:19 Q&A: Targeting Any Smart Contract 11:01 Q&A: Partners and Chain Availability 11:39 Q&A: Third-Party Contract Whitelisting 12:00 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Alvaro Lillo, a solutions engineer on Sui's builder growth team, walks hackers through the Sui prizes and, most importantly, how to integrate Walrus, Sui's decentralized storage solution, with EVM dApps. Alongside his colleague Ralph at the booth, he shares a collection of resources, starting with example integrations showing how to swap a typical IPFS or Filecoin setup for Walrus in common use cases. He highlights a newly released product, Walrus Memory, built on top of Walrus for storing encrypted memories from AI agents, which he suggests is useful for anyone doing agent work. He also points to a Sui plugin that helps implement anything on the Sui stack by injecting the docs (noting it is token-expensive, so use it deliberately) and integrating a Move language server, which is handy since that is not built into Claude Code, the tool he hopes most hackers will use this weekend. Alvaro explains how the prizes are structured around the hackathon's two main tracks. For the existing project track, the focus is on projects swapping their decentralized storage integration for Walrus, judged primarily on product-market fit rather than novel uses of Move, since the goal is products with existing traction and users that are ready to go to market. A portion of the pool is reserved for the new project track, where builders can create anything entirely on Sui using Move or integrating Walrus or another part of the stack. He points to links, faucets for testnet tokens, and QR codes at the booth. In an extended Q&A, he clarifies that Walrus is programmable decentralized storage infrastructure (not a single product), that the decentralized cloud people remember is just a product built on top of it (like Walrus Harbor), that Walrus is far faster than IPFS and Arweave on both uploads and retrievals, and that it can store anything, not just web3 data. He explains Walrus is built using Sui, relying on Sui's smart contracts to coordinate storage, and that Sui's object-oriented model provides built-in security around digital assets, making access control and complex data structures much easier to manage than in Solidity, before sending everyone off to build. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 Welcome to the Sui Workshop 00:45 Meet Alvaro and Ralph at the Booth 01:14 A Collection of Resources to Check 01:14 Integrating Walrus With EVM dApps 01:46 Introducing Walrus Memory for Agents 02:20 The Sui Plugin and Move Language Server 02:49 Why It Helps Claude Code Users 03:20 How the Prizes Are Structured 03:46 The Existing Project Track and Product-Market Fit 04:13 The New Project Track on Sui 04:46 Links, Faucets, and Testnet Tokens 05:14 Q&A: What Excites You the Most 06:07 Q&A: How to Think About Walrus Today 06:59 Walrus as Programmable Storage Infrastructure 07:16 Q&A: Building Without Walrus 07:40 Q&A: Help With Move Coding 08:06 Q&A: Walrus vs IPFS and Arweave 08:31 Q&A: Faster Uploads and Retrievals 08:52 Q&A: Is Walrus Only for Web3 09:07 Q&A: How Walrus Uses Sui 09:29 Q&A: Sui's Object-Oriented Model 10:08 Why Access Control Is Easier Than Solidity 10:31 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Tanner Moore, a technical account manager at 1inch, presents reimagining the AMM with 1inch Aqua, covering the current DEX landscape and its assumptions, what Aqua is and how it reimagines the AMM, extending beyond AMMs, and the benefits for LPs, traders, and builders. He starts with the classic example: Bob the liquidity provider deposits ETH and USDC into a Uniswap V2 pool, then Alice trades against that liquidity and Bob earns fees. But with many AMMs and LPs, the ecosystem grows fragmented. 1inch solved the trader side long ago with its aggregator, keeping Alice's experience simple, but fragmentation only accelerated behind the scenes, with endless reimplementation of custody, accounting, and settlement. From the LP's perspective, choosing where to deposit is painful, participation has high opportunity cost (locking funds in one AMM forfeits other yields and often DAO governance), moving funds is high-friction and security-intensive, and new projects keep incentivizing more fragmentation. Tanner explains Aqua's core question: can you get the AMM experience without an AMM holding funds in the middle? In Aqua, liquidity stays in the LP's own wallet, unbound to any strategy, so Bob can sell, send, or reuse his tokens freely while settlement stays atomic and feels identical to a normal swap for Alice. The architecture has three parts: the Aqua router (a simple 80-line contract handling LP registration, balances, and swap settlement), Aqua applications (swap logic like constant product, concentrated liquidity, and stable swap), and strategies (the accounting of an LP's commitments). He walks through the on-chain flow where Bob permits the router and calls a ship function, an indexer picks up his commitment, and a trader's quote pulls from Bob's wallet on verification. Benefits include selling committed tokens anytime, keeping governance voting power, and reusing the same tokens across strategies so $4,000 of real liquidity becomes $6,000 of effective liquidity. He introduces SwapVM, a virtual machine inside the EVM that abstracts AMM design into building-block op codes (price curves, taker restrictions, fees, decay functions), extensible with external calls or custom op codes. He notes Aqua extends beyond AMMs to prediction markets, privacy pools, and flash loans, shares the market impact for LPs, users, and builders, and closes with bounties ($5,000 for new Aqua apps, $2,000 for extending existing ones) and Q&A. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 What the Talk Will Cover 00:44 The Classic LP Example With Bob 01:24 How a Trader Swaps Against the Pool 01:41 Why the Ecosystem Gets Fragmented 01:52 How 1inch Solved the Trader Side 02:33 Why Fragmentation Only Accelerated 02:51 LP Drawback: Choosing Where to Deposit 03:09 The High Opportunity Cost of Participation 03:28 Losing Access to Governance 03:50 Why Moving Funds Is High Friction 04:24 How New Projects Incentivize Fragmentation 04:50 The Problem With Funds in the Middle 05:13 The Question Behind Aqua 05:36 How Liquidity Stays in the LP Wallet 06:11 The Three Parts of Aqua's Architecture 06:21 The Aqua Router 07:07 Aqua Applications 07:27 Aqua Strategies 07:50 Walking Through the On-Chain Flow 08:46 How the Commitment Is Indexed 09:04 How a Trader Pulls From Bob's Wallet 10:19 Reusing Tokens Across Strategies 10:40 Turning $4,000 Into $6,000 of Liquidity 11:31 Handling Pressure on the Same LP 12:10 Beyond Constant Product: Introducing SwapVM 12:58 SwapVM as Building Blocks for Swaps 13:35 Solidity vs SwapVM Side by Side 14:56 Aqua Extends Beyond AMMs 15:50 A Flash Loan Example in Aqua 16:31 Participating in Many Strategies at Once 17:12 The Impact on the DeFi Market 17:50 The Aqua Bounties 18:10 Q&A: Virtual Balances 19:31 Q&A: Using Custom Op Codes 20:42 Q&A: SwapVM as a Solidity Interpreter 21:14 Q&A: Liquidity Ranges 22:06 Q&A: EOA vs Contract LPs 22:20 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Nalin Mittal and Goutham Deva from Google Cloud's Web3 team present building for the on-chain agent economy, centered on ERC-8004 and accessing its data through BigQuery. Nalin, who leads Web3 product efforts, notes Google Cloud has built Web3 products since 2018, with BigQuery datasets for over 40 blockchains, faucets for many test networks, and growing agentic access. He frames the core problem: as agents gain autonomy and begin purchasing from and delegating to other agents, real-time markets will form on the fly, but you cannot extend trust across organizational boundaries without knowing who you are dealing with. Standards like MCP (for tools and services) and Google's A2A (agent-to-agent communication) exist, but the trust piece is still missing, and ERC-8004 bridges that gap. Goutham and Nalin explain that ERC-8004, built in collaboration with MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, and Coinbase and live on Ethereum mainnet since January 29 (and other chains), establishes three pieces. Identity: calling a register event mints an NFT tied to the agent and returns an agent ID, with the metadata holding a name, description, and most importantly the service endpoints (A2A, MCP), whether it supports x402, and which trust models it uses. Reputation: a give-feedback contract method lets anyone leave on-chain, public feedback (star ratings, uptime, response times) via open-ended tags. Validation: still a work in progress, a way to prove an agent did the work it claimed via a third-party validator and hash. They then show how to access the 8004 data through Google's BigQuery Ethereum dataset (indexed from genesis to chain tip, with a generous 1 TB free tier plus a $1,000 coupon for the track), walking through live SQL queries for registrations per day, decoding a register event, a reputation leaderboard, and an x402 join showing which agents support x402. Nalin lays out the $5,000 cash prize for applications leveraging the identity and reputation data (like an explorer or analytics dashboard), and closes with Q&A on monetization (none, it is an open registry), available datasets like Base, how feedback works, spam, and whether the spec extends beyond agents. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Meet Nalin and Google Cloud Web3 00:54 Meet Goutham 01:16 How the Workshop Is Structured 01:40 The $5,000 Prize 02:01 Why Agents Need Trust 02:23 Delegation and Real-Time Agent Markets 02:41 MCP, A2A, and the Missing Trust Piece 03:39 Trusting Agents Across Organizations 04:01 The Three Pieces of ERC-8004 04:36 Built With MetaMask, EF, and Coinbase 04:54 Identity: Registering an Agent 05:34 What the Agent File Contains 05:55 Service Endpoints and x402 Support 06:18 Reputation: Giving Feedback 06:39 Why Tags Are Open-Ended 07:05 Building a Reputation System 07:15 Validation: Proving Work Was Done 07:58 The Identity and Reputation Registries 08:21 The BigQuery Ethereum Dataset 08:47 The Free Tier and $1,000 Coupon 09:30 How to Set Up Access 10:14 Walking Through Live Queries 11:29 Understanding the Dataset Fields 11:50 Query: Registrations Per Day 12:24 Query: Decoding a Register Event 13:12 Reading the Agent URI 13:58 Decoding Input Data on the Contract 14:22 Query: Reputation Leaderboard 14:52 Query: The x402 Join 15:55 More on the Prize 16:15 What a Winning Application Looks Like 17:01 Where to Find Resources 17:24 Q&A: Plans to Monetize 8004 18:11 Q&A: Datasets for Base and BNB 18:41 Q&A: What Is 8004 19:36 Q&A: Interesting Findings in the Agents 19:52 Q&A: How Leaving Feedback Works 21:00 Q&A: Judging and Spam 22:00 Q&A: Does the Spec Go Beyond Agents 23:11 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Jatin Pandya, a developer advocate at the Canton Foundation, gives hackers a heads-up on Canton's hackathon tracks and a 101 on the network and its DAML smart contract language. He runs through the four prize tracks. First is private DeFi and capital markets: taking the DeFi use cases people already know (DEXes, perps, margin management, dark pool matching, lending, borrowing, collateralized protocols) and adding a natively built-in privacy element, since privacy, not TPS, is now the talk of the town. Second, the one he is most excited about, is privacy-native TradFi, RWAs, and tokenization: repo agreement automation and management platforms, tokenized bond issuance, and supply chain finance built on Canton's need-to-know privacy model. Third is payments and neobanks on top of Canton, tying into institutions like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and DTCC. Fourth, more exploratory, is agentic commerce, exploring how AI agents would interact with a privacy-preserving blockchain. Jatin points to his existing video workshop, revamped documentation (with an MCP server and a native LLM model that surfaces the right docs or SDK), and a dedicated module comparing Solidity and DAML concept by concept, noting DAML feels like writing English to those who know TypeScript or Haskell. He explains Canton's flipped architecture: rather than one blockchain with RPC calls, a single global synchronizer operated by the foundation coordinates atomicity across per-entity validators (JP Morgan, DTCC, and others each run their own), with data visible only to the relevant parties and sub-transaction privacy so two parties in a trade can keep it hidden from everyone else. He clarifies that Canton uses parties rather than wallet addresses, and that DAML is access-based, structured around templates (blueprints rather than functions) with signatories, observers, and choices (the functionality). He walks through example templates for a token and a trade proposal (buyer, asset, price, seller as signatory), then demos deployment via the C-port tool at devport.io, where an ETHGlobal New York organization is preconfigured so hackers can build or import from GitHub and deploy to a devnet validator without running their own. He closes by pointing to his full zero-to-deploy video and offering booth help. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Welcome to the In-Person Workshop 00:33 A TLDR on the Four Prize Tracks 00:33 Track One: Private DeFi and Capital Markets 01:48 Track Two: Privacy-Native TradFi and Tokenization 02:38 Why This Is the Track He Is Most Excited About 02:57 Track Three: Payments and Neobanks 03:18 Working With Major Institutions 03:49 Track Four: Agentic Commerce 04:21 A Quick Heads-Up on Resources 04:40 The Revamped Docs and LLM Model 05:41 The Solidity vs DAML Comparison Module 06:00 Why DAML Feels Like English 06:54 Why Deploying on Canton Is Different 07:24 Introducing the C-port Tool 08:12 The Preconfigured ETHGlobal Organization 09:17 How Canton's Architecture Is Flipped 09:41 The Global Synchronizer and Validators 10:04 Parties Instead of Addresses 10:36 Sub-Transaction Privacy Explained 11:00 Why DAML Is Genuinely Different 11:35 Templates, Signatories, and Observers 12:12 Parties, Not Wallet Addresses 12:36 The Structure of a DAML Model 13:14 Declaring a Token Template 13:43 How Ownership and Signing Work 13:57 A Trade Proposal Example 14:52 How Choices Define Functionality 15:17 Q&A on Defining Trades 16:44 Writing a DAML File in C-port 17:13 Building and Deploying to Devnet 17:42 Where to Get Help With DAML 18:23 Closing and the Full Video Workshop _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Logan Nguyen, an engineer at Hashgraph, shows hackathon builders how to move faster on Hedera using its open source collection of AI plugins and skills. He opens with a recap of Hedera for the mixed audience: it is a fully EVM-compatible L1, so anything built on Ethereum (MetaMask, Solidity smart contracts, Foundry, ethers.js) migrates and works out of the box, plus native protocol services like the Hedera Token Service (ERC-20 and ERC-721 style tokens with built-in KYC, freeze, pause, and royalty fees, no separate Solidity contract needed), the Hedera Consensus Service for messaging and topic subscription, a schedule service for on-chain automation, smart contract service, and more. He notes Hedera processes over 10,000 transactions per second with roughly 3-second finality, low fixed and predictable fees (a fraction of a cent), and a carbon-negative network. Logan then introduces Hedera Skills, the open source collection of plugins and skills built by Hedera's DevRel team, covering six capabilities: the hackathon helper, an agent kit plugin (for building AI agents that interact with the network via natural language using the Hedera Agent Toolkit), dev intelligence for scaffolding and session tracking, native services JavaScript (interacting with native services via the SDK without Solidity), system contracts (the Solidity counterpart for the same services), and the recently added Hedera CLI reference. He goes deep on the hackathon helper's two skills: hackathon PRD, run before writing any code, which teaches Claude, Cursor, or Codex to read Hedera's criteria, ask questions, narrow scope to a demoable MVP, and produce a buildable product requirements document, and validate submission, run before submitting, which does a mock judging pass against Hedera's seven criteria to catch bugs. He live-demos installing the hackathon helper in Claude with three commands and generating a PRD, then introduces the Hedera docs MCP server, which solves AI knowledge cutoff by giving agents a search tool over always-up-to-date documentation, SDK references, and code examples via one command to a remote hosted server. He closes with the four bounty tracks (AI agent, agentic payments, tokenization with no Solidity, and autonomous on-chain automation) and $15,000 in prizes. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Meet Logan and the Goal of the Workshop 00:32 The Idea: Open Source Plugins and Skills 01:04 A Quick Recap on What Hedera Is 01:30 Why Your EVM Stack Works Out of the Box 01:44 Native Services: The Hedera Token Service 02:27 The Consensus, Schedule, and Smart Contract Services 02:59 Throughput, Finality, and Low Fees 03:35 Why Hedera Is a Carbon-Negative Network 04:24 36 Hours and $15,000 in Prizes 04:51 Introducing Hedera Skills 05:37 The Six Capabilities in the Repo 06:02 The Agent Kit and Dev Intelligence Plugins 06:36 Native Services JavaScript vs System Contracts 07:12 The Recently Added Hedera CLI 07:44 Going Deeper: The Hackathon PRD Skill 08:21 How the PRD Skill Narrows Your Scope 09:00 The Validate Submission Skill 09:36 A Mock Judging Pass Before You Submit 09:52 Live Demo: Installing the Hackathon Helper 10:53 Generating a PRD From an Idea 11:21 How the Skill Asks Questions to Brainstorm 12:47 Claude Generates the PRD 13:13 Introducing the Hedera Docs MCP Server 13:39 Solving the AI Knowledge Cutoff Problem 14:28 One Command to Add the Server 14:58 Using the Server With Natural Language 15:42 Recapping the Two Tools 16:03 The Four Bounty Tracks and Prizes 16:31 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Solange Gueiros

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Solange Gueiros and Andrej Rakic from Chainlink introduce the Chainlink Confidential AI Attester and walk through how to use Chainlink across hackathon projects. Solange runs through the four bounties: three best projects using the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) and its workflows, two best projects using any other Chainlink service, two best projects using the new Chainlink Confidential AI Attester, and two best projects extending an existing Chainlink project on the continuity track, all combinable. She encourages installing the Chainlink developer agent skills, which carry the expertise to build with Chainlink services in any environment like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, so hackers can focus on use cases rather than becoming experts over a weekend. Andrej introduces the Confidential AI Attester, an early alpha experiment from Chainlink's research and engineering teams, and notes Professor Ari Juels will be a special guest judge for that track on Sunday. He frames the problem: proving your financials today (for a loan or a car) requires showing the books and involving notaries and lawyers, which is not private, and cannot be done in DeFi. Good candidate use cases include undercollateralized DeFi loans, KYC, AML, and proof of reserves, anything that involves uploading documents for analysis. He demos the playground (which needs an API key from the booth or Discord), uploading a mock AI-generated financial PDF and prompting the attester to judge whether the individual is a suitable candidate for a 500 USDC undercollateralized loan. The analysis runs inside a Trusted Execution Environment (an AWS Nitro Enclave) so the document does not leak, using an open LLM (Gemma, switchable to others). Once he gets the attestation, a CRE callback decrypts and decodes the decision and stores it on a simple smart contract exposing view functions a DeFi protocol can check. He walks through simulating the CRE workflow locally (CRE CLI version 19 or above waits for an HTTP or log trigger), exposing localhost via ngrok, and appending a broadcast flag so a simulation still writes on-chain to testnet, showing the resulting approved decision, document digest, and transaction hash. He clarifies CRE is optional (the attester works standalone, callable via curl or any language), points to the demo repo, and closes with Q&A on verifying callbacks and where to get API keys and data streams testnet credentials. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 Why Chainlink for Your Hackathon Project 00:36 Meet Solange and Andrej 01:00 The Chainlink Bounties 01:31 The New Confidential AI Attester Bounty 02:01 Extending an Existing Chainlink Project 02:12 Installing the Chainlink Developer Skills 02:29 The Chainlink Runtime Environment 02:56 A Special Guest Judge: Ari Juels 03:18 What Is the Confidential AI Attester 03:42 Why Proving Financials Is Not Private 04:02 An Early Alpha Experiment 04:25 Candidate Use Cases 04:48 A Look at the Playground and Resources 05:33 Why to Use the AI Skills 05:52 Getting an API Key 06:16 Uploading a Financial PDF 06:45 Running the Analysis Inside a TEE 07:16 Verifying the Attestation On Chain 07:49 How the CRE Callback Stores the Decision 08:20 The Undercollateralized Loan Prompt 08:40 Checking the CRE CLI Version 09:05 Simulating With an HTTP Trigger 09:29 Exposing Localhost With ngrok 09:54 Submitting the Request 10:18 The Broadcast Flag Writes to Testnet 11:07 Seeing the Approved Decision and Transaction 11:34 Querying the Contract for the Decision 12:02 The LLM and Enclave Behind It 12:36 Q&A: Is CRE Required 13:04 Walking Through the Demo Repo 14:07 Q&A: Verifying the Callback 15:21 Recapping the Four Bounties 16:35 API Keys and Data Streams Credentials 17:15 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kevin Jones

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Kevin Jones from BuidlGuidl walks hackers through building on Ethereum in the AI era, tying together the tools and best practices that let developers learn and ship faster. Having worked in the Ethereum ecosystem for about six years alongside Austin Griffith and the Ethereum Foundation, he surveys what BuidlGuidl has produced for developer education and tooling. He gives a tour of SpeedRun Ethereum, the challenge-based curriculum that teaches core concepts through hands-on modules: minting an NFT, crowdfunding and staking, ERC-20 tokens and the approve pattern, a dice game on on-chain randomness, building a DEX with liquidity pools, oracles, overcollateralized lending, stablecoins, prediction markets, and zero knowledge, plus capture-the-flag security events and a new AI-guided learning mode. He also covers other BuidlGuidl products including Scaffold-ETH, ABI Ninja, Address Vision, and its full node client. Kevin then dives into AI-era building. He explains x402 (Coinbase's extension of the HTTP 402 status code) as a way to token-gate any API with an onchain payment instead of API keys, noting his work at Edge & Node (creators of The Graph) on a wallet that makes and accepts x402 payments with guardrails. He highlights ETH skills, an open source skill file encoding Ethereum best practices for editors like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, and ERC-8004, a registry giving AI agents a long-lived onchain reputation (with Agent0's SDK and a subgraph for querying agents). He shares his AI coding workflow: ideate in Claude Desktop to generate a prompt, bootstrap in Claude Code, then move to Cursor to review diffs. He runs a live Scaffold-ETH demo, spinning up a project with two commands, explaining the Hardhat and Next.js monorepo, burner wallet, auto-generated ABI-driven debug UI, hooks, and components (ENS resolution, balance checkers), then vibe-codes a basketball NFT contract that deploys and mints a LeBron card. He closes on OneClaw, his spotlight secrets-management platform storing keys in a Google Cloud HSM with multi-party computation, an LLM proxy running in a TEE that inspects prompts for injection and redacts secrets, and intent-based signing with guardrails so an agent can use a key that never leaves hardware, followed by Q&A. 00:00 Introduction 00:13 Nostalgia for ETHGlobal New York 00:32 About Kevin and BuidlGuidl 01:00 Why AI Accelerates Learning and Building 02:15 Introducing SpeedRun Ethereum 02:46 Scaffold-ETH as a Starter Kit 03:45 A Walk Through SpeedRun Challenges 04:40 ERC-20 Tokens and the Approve Pattern 05:09 The Dice Game and On-Chain Randomness 05:35 Building a DEX and Liquidity Pools 06:20 Oracles and Overcollateralized Lending 07:13 Stablecoins and Prediction Markets 08:28 Learning Zero Knowledge 08:58 The Tech Tree and Capture the Flag 10:15 The New AI-Guided Learning Mode 11:06 What Is x402 11:31 How x402 Token-Gates APIs 12:56 Building on x402 With Edge & Node 13:44 ETH Skills for Your Editor 15:06 ERC-8004: A Registry for AI Agents 16:05 Building Agent Reputation 16:42 Agent0 and the Subgraph 18:28 Kevin's AI Coding Workflow 19:12 Starting Ideation in Claude Desktop 21:18 Generating a Prompt for Claude Code 23:36 Moving to Cursor to Review Diffs 24:39 Starting a Scaffold-ETH Project 26:22 Choosing Hardhat or Foundry 29:18 Agent, Plan, and Ask Modes 30:45 Inside the Scaffold-ETH Monorepo 31:36 The AI-Friendly Files and MCP Server 34:00 The Burner Wallet and Debug UI 35:00 How the ABI Powers the Front End 35:58 Vibe-Coding a Basketball NFT Contract 40:19 Minting a LeBron NFT 41:27 The BuidlGuidl Full Node Client 42:20 Introducing OneClaw Secrets Management 43:18 The LLM Proxy in a TEE 44:36 Intent-Based Signing With Guardrails 45:39 Embedded Wallets, MCP, and SDK 46:30 Q&A: Signing Latency 47:49 Q&A: Git Integration for Agents 49:12 Q&A: How ERC-8004 Reputation Works 52:44 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Greg Skril from ENS Labs presents ENS as a source of identity for apps, agents, and more. He starts with the basics: the Ethereum Name Service is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol that lives on Ethereum but scales to the entire internet, most simply turning complex hex addresses into human-readable names (his address becomes gregskril.eth). He frames ENS as a user experience protocol, showing how sending five dollars to a name is far easier than copying a hex address, and how ENS has evolved from a username into a full profile with an avatar, banner, and description that replaces the anonymous gray circle and truncated address most apps show. His first conclusion: users of crypto-powered experiences should never have to interact with a hex address, and anywhere an app reads or writes one, it should support ENS names. He explains how it works through forward resolution (name to data) and reverse resolution (address to name), which combine into a primary name set via reverse registrars on six chains, and can be configured on behalf of another user with their signature. Greg then positions ENS as a universal pointer to anything on the internet, not just addresses: naming smart contracts for clearer block explorer history, decentralized registries (like a hackathon NPM clone where each package is an ENS name with text-record metadata pointing to decentralized content), storing credentials or AI agent metadata via text records (with a spec, ENSIP-26, for agents), and decentralized websites (like Vitalik's IPFS-hosted blog that survives a Cloudflare outage). He covers subnames, which are full ENS names usable for clean hierarchy and cheap free onboarding (buy projectname.eth, give users free subnames), highlighting the Durin tool at durin.dev for deploying subname contracts to an L2 linked to L1. He previews ENS V2 (live on Sepolia) with a cleaner registry design and fine-grained permissions enabling org structures, and an ENS CLI as the easiest way to teach agents to use ENS. He lays out a record $20,000 in prizes across an AI agents track, a creative use track (citing a privacy solution that resolves a name to different addresses per sender), a $6,000 pool prize, and a $4,000 continuity track, then closes with Q&A on reassigning and revoking subdomains, gas costs, off-chain names, and how subnames compare to second-level domains. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 What Is ENS 00:42 Turning Hex Addresses Into Names 01:08 ENS as a User Experience Protocol 01:35 From Username to Full Profile 02:01 Why a Profile Beats a Gray Circle 02:42 ENS Used in the Wild 03:26 Reading and Writing Data With Names 03:56 Why Users Should Never See a Hex Address 04:21 How It Works: Forward and Reverse Resolution 04:52 Primary Names and Reverse Registrars 05:43 Setting a Name on Behalf of Another User 05:59 ENS as a Universal Pointer 06:20 A Decentralized NPM Registry Example 06:46 Storing Credentials and Agent Metadata 07:06 Text Records and ENSIP-26 07:31 Decentralized Websites Like Vitalik's Blog 08:44 Naming Smart Contracts 09:29 Subnames and Clean Hierarchy 10:19 Free Subnames for Onboarding Users 10:41 The Durin Tool for Subnames 11:05 Introducing ENS V2 11:36 New Registry Design and Permissions 11:58 Org Structures With Fine-Grained Access 12:23 A Preview of the ENS CLI 12:49 The $20,000 in Prizes 13:20 The Build From Scratch Tracks 13:39 The AI Agents Track 14:09 The Creative Use Track 14:37 A Privacy Solution Built on ENS 14:57 The Pool Prize 15:20 The Continuity Track 16:02 Key Takeaways 16:30 Where to Get Help 16:53 Q&A: Reassigning Subdomains 18:29 Q&A: Limits on Subdomains and Gas Fees 19:50 Q&A: Preventing Revocation of User Subdomains 21:14 Q&A: Subnames vs Second-Level Domains 22:19 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this welcome and opening ceremony, Kartik Talwar, co-founder of ETHGlobal, opens ETHGlobal New York 2026, stressing that this is not a conference but a hackathon whose mission is to onboard thousands of developers into the web3 ecosystem. He explains what makes ETHGlobal events different: a focus on builders, a place to learn and grow, and the belief that showing beats telling, so on Sunday everyone demos what they built. He traces ETHGlobal's history from a small 2017 hackathon (where NFTs were invented) through global expansion across six continents, noting that counting the recent ETHConf, they have run over 331 events in eight and a half years, hosted 165,000 people from 156 countries, produced 18,000+ hackathon projects, and seen projects raise over $500 million. This weekend brings almost 700 attendees (close to 500 hackers, 30% new to web3), plus supporting staff, 17 mentors, 20 recorded workshops, zero talks, over $200,000 in prizes, and 16 sponsors. Kartik walks through key logistics and rule changes. Hacking begins immediately, teams can have up to five members, and submissions are due Sunday at 9am. On AI, he encourages using tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex but warns from thousands of data points not to use AI to generate or validate your idea (crypto bias is real), to keep a human in the loop, to reference-check SDK integrations, to commit plan files, and to always know what your codebase does. He introduces the new continuity track, letting hackers build from scratch, extend an open source project, or ship a feature into existing or private code, as long as new work stays open source and traceable via the GitHub API, with track-specific prizes. He covers venue security, Wi-Fi etiquette, the website as source of truth, Discord support, four spotlight teams (Aquazero, CodeQuil, Pompalo, Railbridge), and judging: partner-prize demos plus an add-on finalist track for the top 10 teams (up to seven scratch, three continuity) requiring an auditable open source repo, a live deployed site, and a video demo, with finalist perks including ETHGlobal Plus, $1,000 per member, travel, and developer credits. He closes by bringing on partners Tanner from 1inch (Aqua self-custodial AMMs), Gotham from Google Cloud Web3 (ERC-8004 data track), and Greg from ENS (naming as universal pointers), before telling everyone to get hacking. 00:00 Introduction 00:40 What Makes ETHGlobal Events Different 01:03 The History From 2017 to Today 01:49 Expanding Across Six Continents 02:18 The Numbers: 331 Events and Counting 02:44 18,000 Projects and $500 Million Raised 03:47 Mentors, Workshops, and Sponsors 04:27 Thanking the Sponsors 05:01 Logistics: Hacking Begins Now 05:19 The New Rules: Teams and Timing 05:37 Guidance on Using AI to Build 06:12 Explaining Your Contribution vs Delegation 07:11 Why Not to Use AI to Generate Ideas 07:38 Why Not to Use AI to Value Your Idea 08:33 Why Not to Blindly Delegate SDK Integrations 08:56 Always Know What Your Codebase Does 09:43 Introducing the Continuity Track 10:49 The Three Paths You Can Take 11:28 How Extending Open Source Works 12:43 Adding Features to Your Own Project 13:27 Adding a Module to Private Code 14:58 Why Prizes Are Track Specific 15:44 Venue Security and Wristbands 16:39 Wi-Fi 7 and Why Not to Use Hotspots 17:52 The Website and Discord Support 18:53 Food, Activities, and Swag 19:26 The Four Spotlight Teams 20:13 Judging and the Prize Structure 21:03 The Partner Prize Track 21:22 The Finalist Track for the Top 10 21:45 Finalist Perks and Requirements 23:45 Splitting Finalists Across Tracks 24:14 Submission Logistics and Timing 25:54 Why a Better Submission Wins 26:57 Where to Get Help From Mentors 27:40 Code of Conduct and IP Ownership 28:51 Tanner From 1inch on Aqua 31:00 Gotham From Google Cloud on ERC-8004 33:19 Greg From ENS on Naming 35:41 Summarizing the Prizes 36:23 Final Advice and Let's Get Hacking _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this closing ceremony for ETHGlobal New York 2026, Kartik Talwar, co-founder of ETHGlobal, wraps up the hackathon with event stats, ten live finalist demos, and the partner prize reveal. He shares that 682 attendees and 486 hackers (31% new to web3) came from 152 cities, 44 countries, and six continents, supported by 100-plus sponsor staff, 18 mentors, and 20 Friday workshops with zero talks. The 486 hackers built 232 projects (27% on the new continuity track), and for the first time in eight months Python overtook TypeScript as the most common language. DeFi was the biggest category, wallets and payments the most common hacks, and infrastructure rose to third, with ENS, Arc, and Chainlink the most-used integrations and mainnet, Base, and Arc the most-deployed chains. He introduces the 16 partners giving out $200,000 in prizes and the ten finalists (three continuity, seven from scratch). The finalist demos showcase the range: Canary, parametric insurance on prediction markets that prices DeFi risk like a credit default swap; Acrew, which turns the AI coding spinner into an onchain ad marketplace tying one human to one agent via World ID; Void Tactics, a year-old fully onchain PVP spaceship game upgraded with Dynamic embedded wallets, World ID tournaments, and Walrus move history; Lynx, a terminal bridging prediction markets with tokenized securities and traditional finance data; DRO.buzz, a clipping marketplace on Arc, World ID, and Chainlink; Ansu, a dead-simple browser wallet for onboarding newcomers; Proof of Scan, a decentralized network of scan nodes using Sui, Walrus, and TLS notary to catch cloaked phishing sites; The Wallet Shift, a DeFi-Llama-style analytics dashboard indexing ERC-8004 agents via Google BigQuery; Immunity, a decentralized AI security protocol where agents mint antibodies against prompt injection, rebuilt with Chainlink CRE and ENS; and Cumulant, structured products (baskets, tranches, protected notes, distribution markets) on prediction markets via Dynamic and Arc. Kartik details the finalist rewards (ETHGlobal Plus, $1,000 per member, flight and developer credits, a Ledger Flex, and an exclusive hoodie), then races through 60 slides of partner prizes from 1inch, ENS, Google Cloud, Chainlink, Hedera, Ledger, LI.FI, Privy, Sui, Uniswap Foundation, World, Canton Foundation, Blink, Arc, Dynamic, and Unlink. He closes noting code will be verified over four weeks, thanks the team and partners, and previews upcoming events in Lisbon, ETHOnline, Tokyo, and Mumbai. 00:00 Opening Montage 01:35 Welcome to the Closing Ceremony 02:03 The Event by the Numbers 02:32 Thanking the 16 Partners 03:01 Why This Is a Hackathon, Not a Conference 03:49 Community Highlights and Stats 04:28 232 Projects and the Continuity Split 04:53 The Most Common Categories and Integrations 05:54 Thanking the Judges 05:57 A Quick Word on Feedback Forms 07:19 Introducing the Ten Finalists 08:02 Thanking Every Team That Submitted 09:53 Finalist Demo: Canary 13:54 Finalist Demo: Acrew 19:21 Finalist Demo: Void Tactics 25:19 Finalist Demo: Lynx 31:42 Finalist Demo: DRO.buzz 36:36 Finalist Demo: Ansu 41:30 Finalist Demo: Proof of Scan 47:19 Finalist Demo: The Wallet Shift 52:58 Finalist Demo: Immunity 58:30 Finalist Demo: Cumulant 1:04:36 What the Finalists Win 1:05:50 Starting the Partner Prizes 1:07:19 1inch Prizes 1:08:17 ENS Prizes 1:09:46 Google Cloud Prize 1:09:53 Chainlink Prizes 1:11:05 Hedera Prizes 1:12:15 Ledger Prizes 1:13:04 LI.FI Prizes 1:13:28 Privy Prizes 1:13:59 Sui Prizes 1:14:25 Uniswap Foundation Prizes 1:15:14 World Prizes 1:16:09 Canton Foundation Prizes 1:17:00 Blink Prizes 1:17:27 Arc Prizes 1:18:23 Dynamic Prizes 1:19:06 Unlink and Joint Prizes 1:19:50 Wrapping Up the Prizes 1:20:09 Closing Notes and Verification 1:20:38 Thanking the Team and Community 1:22:01 Upcoming Events and Farewell _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this welcome and opening ceremony, Kartik Talwar, co-founder of ETHGlobal, opens ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, stressing that this is not a conference but a hackathon whose mission is to onboard thousands of developers into the web3 ecosystem. He explains what makes ETHGlobal events different: a focus on builders trying out ideas, learning new skills and protocols, and the belief that showing beats telling, so on Sunday everyone demos what they built to judges, partners, and each other. He traces ETHGlobal's history from the first 2017 event in Waterloo through global expansion across six continents, notes the 2026 events in Cannes and last month's New York, and welcomes everyone back to Lisbon for the second time. This weekend brings over 518 attendees (380 hackers, 26% coming from web2), from 116 cities, 47 countries, and six continents, plus 43 partners, 16 technical mentors, eight workshops, zero talks, and $100,000 in prizes across eight partners: 1inch, 0G, Hedera, Sui, The Graph, Uniswap Foundation, World, and ENS. Kartik walks through key logistics and rule changes. Hacking has begun, teams can have up to five members, and submissions are due Sunday at 9am. He encourages using LLMs and AI coding tools like Codex and Claude Code but recommends committing plan markdown files and frequent descriptive commits so work is traceable, sharing SDK feedback with partners, and avoiding four AI pitfalls (do not use AI-generated ideas, get real human feedback, do not just delegate, and always understand your own code). He introduces the continuity track, letting hackers extend a past project, fix an open source bug, or ship an open source module into private code, with track-specific prizes. He covers venue security, Wi-Fi etiquette, Discord support, food, a tile-painting activity, swag, and four spotlight teams. On judging, he explains the partner track (apply to up to three of the eight partners) versus the finalist track (top 10 teams demoing live on stage) with an auditable repo, live deployment, and video demo required, and finalist perks like ETHGlobal Plus, $1,000 cash, flight credits, and AWS credits. He brings on Matt from 1inch, who shares that 1inch began at a 2019 hackathon and has since done over $800 billion in volume, and introduces the $7,000 in bounties for building Aqua apps, a liquidity provision method that keeps tokens in the LP's wallet. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Welcome: This Is a Hackathon, Not a Conference 00:37 What Makes ETHGlobal Events Different 00:54 Why Showing Beats Telling 01:18 The History From 2017 to Today 02:25 Back in Lisbon for the Second Time 02:31 Who Is Here This Weekend 03:05 Partners, Mentors, and Workshops 03:27 $100,000 in Prizes and the Eight Partners 04:28 The Hackathon Has Begun 05:07 Team Rules and Submission Timing 05:42 Using LLMs and AI Coding Tools 06:25 Committing Plan Files and Sharing Feedback 07:24 The Four AI Pitfalls to Avoid 07:47 Why Not to Use AI-Generated Ideas 08:23 Why to Get Real Human Feedback 08:42 Why Not to Just Delegate 09:33 Introducing the Continuity Track 09:55 How to Continue a Past Project 10:55 Extending Open Source and Private Projects 12:08 How to Select Your Track 12:59 Venue Security and Badges 14:05 Wi-Fi Etiquette and No Hotspots 15:00 The Website and Discord 16:29 Venue Layout and Pragma 17:02 Food and Activities 17:53 Swag and Giveaways 18:40 The Four Spotlight Teams 19:54 Judging and Prizes: The Two Tracks 20:19 The Partner Track 20:57 The Finalist Track 21:55 Why Become a Finalist 22:32 The Requirements to Be a Finalist 23:50 Demoing Live to Judges 24:47 The Finalist Demo Format 25:09 Why Not to Record Your Video Last Minute 26:28 How First-Come Judging Works 27:32 The Mentors Who Can Help 28:29 Rules, Respect, and IP Ownership 29:42 Bringing On Matt From 1inch 30:55 Introducing the Aqua Protocol 32:00 The 1inch Bounties 33:39 Recapping the Prizes and Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, a 3-day hackathon held July 24-26 at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWgAODGnD_is _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kevin Jones

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, Kevin Jones from BuidlGuidl (who also works at Edge & Node on The Graph protocol and supports the Ethereum Foundation) walks through building apps on Ethereum in the AI era, covering the key tools and then live-building an app. He introduces BuidlGuidl, created by Austin Griffith, and its flagship learning product SpeedRun Ethereum, a set of challenges that validate your understanding of the protocol across NFTs, crowdfunding, the token vendor and ERC-20 patterns, on-chain randomness and oracles, building a DEX with liquidity pools, oracles, over-collateralized lending (like Aave) and liquidations, stablecoins, and newer guides on prediction markets and ZK voting, plus capture-the-flag events and the ETH tech tree. He then covers Scaffold-ETH, the starter kit that was his own introduction to Ethereum, now launchable with a single command (npx create-eth) that bootstraps a full dApp: smart contract, local chain, and a Next.js front end with pre-written components and hooks, all wired together and made AI-friendly by default. Kevin highlights ETH skills (at ethskills.com), an open source collection of Ethereum best-practice skill files (for smart contracts, code reviews, censorship resistance, privacy, and more) that you add to your coding agent so it builds the best app it can. He live-demos scaffolding a project called Lisbon, explaining the choice between Foundry and Hardhat, splitting the terminal into windows for the chain, front end, and deploys, and how the yarn commands and pre-written scripts simplify setup. He shows how Scaffold-ETH parses the deployed contract's ABI into front-end types and an auto-generated debug UI, plus a built-in burner wallet and faucet that avoid MetaMask nonce issues on a local chain. He debugs a dependency error live (recommending copying the error to the AI and using Opus 4.6 for prototyping), then vibe-codes the starter contract into a basic lottery, showing how the bundled .agents, .claude, and .cursor skill folders automatically load BuidlGuidl's best practices (contributed by members like Carlos) so the agent adds ownable, a reentrancy guard, buy-ticket and pick-winner functions, and updates the front end. He tours reusable components (ENS resolution, address inputs, balance and ether inputs) and read and write hooks, and closes with Q&A on ETH skills folders, simulating time on a local chain, and testing in Foundry versus Hardhat. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Meet Kevin and His Workshops 00:30 Building on Ethereum in the AI Era 00:48 Who Has Used Scaffold-ETH 01:07 Introducing BuidlGuidl and SpeedRun Ethereum 01:56 The Token Vendor and ERC-20 Patterns 02:18 Randomness and Oracles 02:31 Building a DEX and Liquidity Pools 02:48 Over-Collateralized Lending and Liquidations 03:30 Stablecoins, Prediction Markets, and ZK Voting 03:50 Capture the Flag and the ETH Tech Tree 04:14 What Scaffold-ETH Is 04:44 One Command to Bootstrap a dApp 05:24 Introducing ETH Skills 06:17 A Tour of Scaffold-ETH and the Docs 07:12 Why the Pre-Written Front End Helps 07:44 Starting the Project With create-eth 08:29 Choosing Foundry or Hardhat 09:27 Splitting Your Terminal Into Windows 10:09 Why Kevin Uses Cursor 10:33 The Commands to Get Set Up 10:58 Starting the Local Chain 12:04 Deploying the Starter Contract 12:54 How the ABI Powers the Front End 13:47 Loading Up Scaffold-ETH 14:14 Debugging an Error With AI 15:40 The Built-In Burner Wallet and Faucet 16:13 The Debug Contracts Tab 17:05 The Chain Folder and Skill Files 17:57 How the Bundled Skills Work 18:40 Best Practices From the BuidlGuidl Team 19:24 Vibe-Coding a Lottery Contract 20:13 Deploying the AI-Written Changes 20:37 Updating the Front End 20:55 Q&A: Where to Find ETH Skills 21:49 A Tour of the Reusable Components 22:38 The Read and Write Hooks 23:58 Testing the Lottery Page 24:52 Q&A: Testing in Foundry vs Hardhat 25:34 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, a 3-day hackathon held July 24-26 at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWgAODGnD_is _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this short workshop at ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, Alvaro Lillo, a solutions engineer on Sui's builder growth team, alongside his colleague Guilherme, shares a series of resources to help hackers build over the weekend. He starts with the prizes: three in total, one on the continuity track and two on the new project track, all judged primarily on product-market fit, meaning whether the project has any real chance of becoming an actual product. Builders can either integrate part of the Sui stack into an existing Solidity app (with Walrus as the low-hanging fruit) or build a project from scratch, and porting an existing Solidity project over to Sui is equally welcome. Alvaro walks through the prepared resources, all accessible via QR codes. There are code snippets covering common dApp patterns and use cases shown side by side in Solidity and in Move on Sui, plus examples of using Walrus on EVM as a decentralized storage replacement for IPFS that works alongside Solidity or any other stack. For anyone coding with AI, he recommends a Claude Code plugin he built as the best way to make Anthropic's model proficient on Sui, since model training tends to be stale on a niche language like Move. He closes by announcing Hashi, a decentralized primitive newly launched on testnet that week that lets you use your BTC as collateral on Sui, pointing to the official testnet site and an explainer with code, and notes a last-minute issue with the booth QR code while directing hackers to the working links and the ETHGlobal Discord for support. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Welcome to Lisbon 00:16 Meet Alvaro and Guilherme 00:44 The Three Prizes 00:54 Why Product-Market Fit Is the Focus 01:21 Integrate the Stack or Build From Scratch 01:41 The Prepared Resources and Snippets 02:04 Solidity vs Move Patterns 02:29 Using Walrus on EVM 02:53 Building on Sui With AI 03:00 The Claude Code Plugin for Move 03:26 Announcing Hashi: BTC as Collateral 03:56 The Testnet Site and Explainer 04:18 Where to Find the Links 04:53 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, a 3-day hackathon held July 24-26 at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWgAODGnD_is _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this short workshop at ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, Luke Forrest from Hedera walks hackathon builders through Claude Code and the skills that can help them move faster over the weekend, covering plugins, skills, and the Hedera MCP server that connects Claude to Hedera's docs for maximum context. He points to the Hedera skills repo on GitHub (via a QR code also shown at the booth), which contains five skills, and focuses on the main one, the hackathon helper, which has two key sub-skills. Hackathon PRD is a skill you talk to about your idea so it fleshes it out, recommends the best way to implement Hedera, and produces a full product requirement document you can then build from with Claude. Validate submission runs once your project is ready, inspecting your repo and judging it much as the Hedera team will (looking at your Hedera integration and whether it is strong enough to be judged accurately) against criteria like innovation, feasibility, execution, integration, validation success, and the Sunday pitch. Luke shows how easy installation is (adding the hedera-dev skills marketplace and reloading plugins), noting you do not even call the skill directly, just ask Claude to create a hackathon PRD for your idea and paste in the ETHGlobal track criteria so the PRD hits every point needed to succeed. He covers the Hedera Docs MCP, which connects Claude directly to the documentation to speed up building, and offers to help anyone get set up at the booth. He also introduces a recent addition, Scaffold HAR, a scaffold with templates built on best practices (launchable with npx create scaffold-har) that includes templates matching the bounties (x402, a payment handler, cross-chain DCA, and tokenized subscriptions). He closes with a recap of the bounties: AI and agentic payments (two teams, $3,000 each), tokenization on Hedera (two teams, $1,500 each), a no-Solidity smart-contract-free track (up to three winners, $1,000 each), and cross-chain automation using the Hedera schedule service and Axelar. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Who Is Using Claude Code 00:32 What This Workshop Covers 00:43 The Hedera Skills Repo 00:58 The Five Skills and the Hackathon Helper 01:22 The Hackathon PRD Skill 01:53 The Validate Submission Skill 02:18 The Judging Criteria 02:35 How Easy Installation Is 02:51 Generating a PRD From Your Idea 03:12 The Hedera Docs MCP 03:39 Adding the MCP to Claude 04:00 Questions on Skills and MCP 04:08 Introducing Scaffold HAR 04:33 The Templates for the Bounties 04:57 Recapping the Bounties 05:26 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, a 3-day hackathon held July 24-26 at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWgAODGnD_is _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, Caleb Rippey from 1inch presents reimagining the AMM with 1inch Aqua, covering the current DEX landscape, how Aqua works, what it enables beyond AMMs, and the benefits for builders, LPs, and traders. He starts with the standard AMM flow: Bob the liquidity provider transfers tokens into a Uniswap pool, Alice the trader sends ETH in and gets USDC out, and if Bob withdraws his liquidity the pool empties and Alice can no longer trade. Since liquidity is spread across Uniswap, Curve, and Sushi, 1inch acts as a DEX aggregator sourcing the best liquidity, making it feel unified, but every new AMM means redesigned contracts, re-implemented custody, accounting, and settlement, more audits and attack surface, and fragmented liquidity. From the LP's perspective, choosing where to deposit is hard, participation has high opportunity cost, funds locked in a pool lose governance voting power, and moving positions is high-friction, with LPs constantly chasing fee opportunities. Caleb explains Aqua's core idea: remove the pool in the middle so Alice trades directly against Bob's wallet balances. In Aqua, liquidity stays in the LP's wallet, is not bound to one strategy, and settlement is always atomic. The architecture has three parts: the Aqua router (an 80-line contract handling shipping and docking strategies, tracking virtual balances, and pushing and pulling tokens), Aqua apps (swap logic like constant product, Dutch auction, and concentrated liquidity), and strategies (LP commitments to those apps). He walks through the flow where Bob approves and permits the router, ships his strategy as an intent, an off-chain indexer picks up the state, and a trader's request has the Aqua app verify Bob's commitment before the router pulls and pushes tokens. Benefits include keeping governance rights, sending committed tokens freely, and reusing the same tokens across strategies so $4,000 of real liquidity becomes $6,000 of effective liquidity. He introduces SwapVM, which combines swap logic into reusable op codes (price curves, taker restrictions, fees, decay functions) so a constant product app takes only a few op codes, and notes Aqua extends beyond AMMs to prediction markets, privacy pools, flash loans, payment clearing, and lending. He closes with the bounties ($5,000 for a new Aqua app split three ways, $2,000 continuity split two ways) and a Q&A on indexers, deferred pull-and-push accounting, flash loans, and the decay op code for preventing front-running. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 What the Talk Will Cover 00:39 The Standard AMM Flow 01:09 How a Trader Swaps Against the Pool 01:34 What Happens When Bob Withdraws 01:59 Why 1inch Aggregates Liquidity 02:32 The Drawbacks of New AMMs 03:04 LP Drawback: Choosing Where to Deposit 03:34 The High Opportunity Cost of Participation 04:08 Losing Governance Voting Power 04:36 Why Moving Funds Is High Friction 05:04 Chasing Fee Opportunities 05:29 How New Projects Fragment Liquidity 05:47 The Question Behind Aqua 06:08 How Aqua Keeps Liquidity in the Wallet 06:39 The Aqua Router 06:57 Aqua Apps 07:06 Aqua Strategies 07:43 Walking Through the Aqua Flow 08:15 How Bob Ships His Strategy 08:46 How the Indexer Picks Up the State 09:18 How a Trader Pulls From Bob's Wallet 09:45 Returning Tokens to Bob 10:14 What the Design Gets You 10:35 Reusing Tokens Across Strategies 11:17 Turning $4,000 Into $6,000 of Liquidity 11:52 Handling Competing Trades in One Block 12:24 Introducing SwapVM 12:55 Constant Product in SwapVM 13:24 Op Codes and Custom Logic 13:38 How Aqua Extends Beyond AMMs 13:55 A Flash Loan Example 14:35 Subscribing to Many Strategies at Once 15:08 The Impact on the DeFi Market 15:46 The Aqua Bounties 16:20 Q&A: Indexers 16:44 Q&A: Deferred Pull and Push Accounting 17:54 Q&A: Flash Loans and Self-Liquidations 19:32 Q&A: The Decay Op Code 20:30 Q&A: Examples and Resources 21:30 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026, a 3-day hackathon held July 24-26 at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal Lisbon 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWgAODGnD_is _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Devcon · Aug 9, 2026

Devcon 8 is coming to Mumbai and Early Bird tickets are now live! From November 3–6, 2026, the Ethereum ecosystem will gather at Jio World Center for four days of technical depth, open-source collaboration, public goods, community, and the builders shaping the future of open source technology.

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Andrej Bencic, co-founder and CEO of Tenderly, makes the case that the next decade of crypto requires shifting focus from building the rails to operating them safely. He opens with a story of a routine protocol upgrade where tests passed, the audit was clean, governance approved, and the time lock executed normally, yet within four minutes of mainnet deployment an asset valued at $2,200 dropped to $0, triggering cascading liquidations and nearly $2 million in bad debt. The smart contracts behaved exactly as intended. The failure wasn't in the code, but in everything around it. Andrej argues that the industry has hyperfocused on getting protocols from idea to mainnet while neglecting operational risk in production with live state and live dependencies. He uses the analogy that the map is not the territory: smart contracts are the map, but mainnet is the territory full of traffic, congestion, and population density. He outlines four categories of risk that must be managed together. Process risk covers operational mishaps like signing transactions, treasury management, and deployment workflows, where he cites that process exploits now outnumber code exploits by 6 to 7 times. Dependency risk covers second, third, and fourth order failures across the interconnected web of DeFi protocols. Market risk recognizes that DeFi lacks trading hours, circuit breakers, and human checkpoints that traditional finance relies on, so multi day unwinds can happen in an instant. Code risk remains essential as ever but needs to test onchain dynamics, not just isolated sandboxes. He closes by introducing the concept of blockchain operations and pointing to simulation against live state as the unique advantage blockchain offers, comparing it to pilots in flight simulators or banks running stress tests. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 A Routine Upgrade Gone Wrong 01:04 $2 Million in Bad Debt in Four Minutes 01:33 The Smart Contracts Behaved as Intended 01:51 Andrej's Background at Tenderly 02:38 Why None of the Checks Triggered 03:03 Hyperfocusing on Reaching Mainnet 03:26 The Work Doesn't Stop at Launch 04:10 The Map Is Not the Territory 05:38 Smart Contracts Are Half the Equation 06:38 Crypto Becoming Finance Itself 07:11 Risk Management as the Next Decade's Discipline 07:47 Four Categories of Risk 08:20 Process Risk and Operational Mishaps 09:37 Six to Seven Times More Process Exploits Than Code Exploits 09:59 Dependency Risk and the DeFi Lego Tradeoff 11:18 Knowing the Blast Radius of Dependencies 11:53 Market Risk Without Circuit Breakers 13:19 Modeling Comfort with Exposure 13:36 Code Risk Remains Essential 14:23 Testing Onchain Dynamics, Not Just Isolated Sandboxes 14:52 Correct at Launch Doesn't Mean Correct at Scale 15:22 Frameworks From Traditional Finance 15:49 Simulation Against Live State as the Tying Piece 16:23 No Undo Buttons on Blockchain 16:48 Pilots, Banks, and Stress Testing 17:43 Blockchain Operations as a Category 18:16 Closing: Operating at the Level Global Attention Requires _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar sits down with Nemil Dalal, visiting partner at Y Combinator and former head of Coinbase's developer platform, to discuss the early days of USDC, the current state of crypto startups, and what YC is looking for from founders. Nemil walks through how he spent seven years at Coinbase leading USDC from launch in 2018, when many in crypto circles thought stablecoins were the wrong vision and Bitcoin should replace everything. He pushed against two early strategies that didn't fit Coinbase's positioning as a US based regulated company: chasing high yield Asian markets where Tether dominated, and selling to banks that only knew about Bitcoin and saw stablecoins as a beta dollar. The breakthrough insight was bootstrapping DeFi adoption through the USDC Bootstrap Fund, deploying capital into Uniswap, Aave (then EthLend), DyDx, and other early protocols. Nemil shares how YC funds about 100 crypto startups today and expects to 10x that in the next decade, since crypto is moving from a niche DGen product to something most Americans will use without realizing. He outlines what YC is excited about: stablecoins and the businesses built on top, tokenized assets including equities and debt, and AI plus crypto including X2X (which Nemil's team launched at Coinbase). He shares his controversial view that founders should launch fewer tokens, since most are incentive tokens that act like marketing schemes attracting mercenary users and worsening UX, while reserving tokens for L1s, L2s, and DeFi protocols where decentralization is genuinely core to the product. On regulation, he tells the story of Coshi spending three years suing the CFTC and winning, framing regulation as either go regulation forward and specialize per country, or follow the Binance playbook offshore first. He closes urging founders to combine crypto with AI thoughtfully and pointing to the rolling YC application deadline. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 Nemil's Background and Homecoming to Ethereum 01:08 Launching USDC at Coinbase in 2018 02:26 Why Stablecoins Were Controversial in Crypto Circles 02:41 Two Bad Early Strategies: Asia Yield and Banks 03:41 The Breakthrough: Bootstrapping DeFi 03:58 Maker DAO, Compound, and Early DeFi Signals 04:23 Launching the USDC Bootstrap Fund 05:10 Nemil's Role as Visiting Partner at Y Combinator 05:38 What YC Offers Founders 06:20 Funding 100+ Crypto Startups and 10x'ing the Pace 07:00 Why Bear Markets Are the Best Time to Build 07:32 Tourists vs Real Builders 07:50 Why ETH Global Hackathon Attendance Correlates Inversely with Price 08:46 What YC Is Looking to Fund in 2026 09:04 Stablecoins and Stablecoin Neo Banks 09:51 Tokenized Stocks, Debt, Equity, and Emerging Markets 10:12 X2X and the AI Plus Crypto Opportunity 10:50 Agentic Finance May Be Agnostic to Crypto vs Credit Cards 11:33 YC's Mindset: Make Something People Want 12:14 Where Is the Saturated Space in Crypto Startups 12:38 Common Patterns: Dev Tools, On Off Ramps, Wallets 13:08 Prediction Markets and Crypto as Core Stack 13:25 Should Founders Launch a Token 14:10 Incentive Tokens as a Marketing Scheme 14:48 Tokens Often Hurt User Experience 15:19 Where Tokens Genuinely Make Sense: L1s, L2s, DeFi 16:05 Solving Pain Points, Not Decentralizing for Its Own Sake 16:36 How Founders Should Think About Regulation 17:01 The Coshi Story: Suing the CFTC and Winning 17:39 Regulation Forward vs Binance Playbook 18:43 Onshore vs Offshore Based on Product Type 19:00 How to Apply to YC and Reach Nemil 19:35 The Magic of Crypto and AI Coming Together 20:33 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sreeram Kannan

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Nikita Sachdev from Luna PR sits down with Sreeram Kannan, founder of Eigen Labs and former University of Washington professor, to discuss the verifiability layer needed for the AI agent economy. Nikita opens by asking the audience to raise hands on whether they'd trust an AI agent to book a flight (most hands), make a $100 transaction (more hands), or hand over their passport, bank accounts, and identities (almost none). Sreeram identifies two layers of agent verifiability: confirming the agent is running exactly the code and model claimed, and enforcing constraints on what the agent can do. He stratifies agents into single player (where a user can run them locally with their own constraints) and multiplayer (where agents adjudicate between mutually untrusting parties like a prediction market), noting that multiplayer agents need much higher trust guarantees. Eigen Compute solves this by guaranteeing the exact prompts, model, and data used in agent decisions. Sreeram shares his personal AGI moment from 2017 working on DNA sequencing with physicist Jens Gundlach, when a student beat his hand crafted mathematical benchmarks using deep neural networks, teaching him that any objectively verifiable problem can be optimized by AI. He recounts a recent story where an Eigen colleague who hadn't finished college responded to Google's quantum breakthrough by launching ECDSA.fail, an open challenge where anonymous agent operators collaborate. Within six days they not only beat Google's benchmark but went 40% better than anything existing. He warns the next 6 to 12 months will be scary for DeFi as AI cracks instant settlement protocols, suggesting protocols with intentional settlement lag will weather this better. He closes by outlining Eigen's new thesis of agentic companies: agents at the center, humans at the edge, with company credentials (websites, YouTube channels, Stripe accounts, Roblox games) owned by onchain smart contracts so that every digital company becomes investable by crypto capital. 00:00 Introduction 00:32 Sreeram's Background and Eigen Labs Overview 01:21 Audience Hand Raising: How Much Do You Trust AI Agents 02:09 Two Layers of Agent Verifiability 02:42 Single Player vs Multiplayer Agents 03:28 Prediction Markets and Multiplayer Trust 04:15 How Eigen Compute Guarantees Agent Execution 04:42 What Makes Eigen the Right Company for AI 05:31 Sreeram's 2017 AGI Moment with DNA Sequencing 06:41 Why Objectively Verifiable Problems Get Optimized by AI 07:20 How AI Led Sreeram Into Blockchain 07:52 Eigen Layer's Original AI Thesis 08:17 Climbing the Product Stack to Agentic Companies 09:23 Would EigenLayer Move This Fast Without AI 09:46 The Google Quantum Breakthrough Story 11:06 ECDSA.fail: 40% Better Than Google in Six Days 12:12 The 10x to 100x Acceleration Opportunity 13:09 Is Crypto Moving Fast Enough Against AI Attacks 13:49 Instant Settlement vs Security Tradeoff 14:31 Why the Next Six to Twelve Months Will Be Scary for DeFi 14:56 What About Other People's Jobs 15:21 The Agents as Companies Thesis 16:05 Crypto's Core Value Proposition Is Capital 16:29 Why Only Five DeFi Protocols Are Investable 16:53 Putting Digital Company Credentials Onchain 17:19 Fully Onchain Agents That Cannot Run Away 17:51 Agents at the Center, Humans at the Edge 18:24 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Taylor Lindman, Chief Counsel of the SEC's Crypto Task Force, sits down with Salman Banaei from Plume to discuss the SEC's evolving approach to onchain capital markets. Taylor explains that the Crypto Task Force, established by Chairman Atkins as one of his first acts, serves a coordination function across the SEC, assisting with rulemaking, conducting outreach (over 200 industry meetings to date), and institutionalizing crypto expertise across SEC divisions. The task force is measuring itself on two major buckets: clarifying when tokens are subject to securities laws (resulting in a recent commission interpretation), and accommodating new ways market participants want to tokenize, clear, and settle securities. The conversation digs into how SEC regulation maps onto public permissionless blockchains like Ethereum versus permissioned alternatives. Taylor expresses that blockchains work best as neutral infrastructure with permissionless properties, while acknowledging tradeoffs for specific applications. He walks through how Bank Secrecy Act and KYC requirements apply mainly to intermediaries like broker dealers and mutual funds, and how transparent onchain systems can enable compliance through new methods like allow lists and onchain checks. Taylor discusses how DeFi protocols challenge traditional intermediary frameworks since smart contracts lack the "person" most regulations are built around, the issuer led tokenization model recently outlined by SEC staff, and a major shift in enforcement away from registration violations toward materiality and actual harm. He closes by inviting builders to engage with the task force directly through their website. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 What the SEC Crypto Task Force Does 02:22 Two Major Buckets: Token Status and Onchain Securities 03:08 Key Performance Indicators Through 2028 04:38 The SEC's View on Public vs Permissioned Blockchains 05:47 Why Neutral Infrastructure Matters 07:02 Bank Secrecy Act, KYC, and AML Requirements Explained 08:32 Non BSA Reasons for Identity Collection 09:49 New Technologies for Compliance Onchain 10:53 How the SEC Interfaces with Treasury on Innovation 11:48 Mapping Securities Laws onto DeFi Protocols 13:21 When Protocols Are No Longer Acting Like Intermediaries 14:46 The Path for DeFi as Neutral Infrastructure 16:08 The Immature State of Tokenized Securities Markets 16:50 The Role of Issuers and Transfer Agents 17:21 Issuer Led Tokenization Models 18:23 Third Party Issued Securities and Derivatives 20:09 Re-Evaluating Enforcement Theories Against DeFi Developers 21:38 Reset Point on Investment Contract Analysis 22:50 From Registration Violations to Material Harm 23:15 Call to Builders: Engage with the Task Force 24:01 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Camila Russo from The Defiant sits down with Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap, to discuss the current state of DeFi, the recent Unification proposal, regulation, RWAs, perps, and what's next for Uniswap V4. Hayden frames the current moment as a pivotal one where DeFi is being integrated into mainstream finance through Coinbase, Robinhood, Deel, and traditional fintechs, while simultaneously facing a wave of security exploits driven by smarter AI tooling like Claude finding vulnerabilities in poorly written contracts. He sleeps well at night because Uniswap V3 underwent nine consecutive audits with a $15 million bounty, processes over a trillion dollars per year, and has never been exploited. He argues AI tooling will ultimately harden DeFi contracts to a far greater extent, and the projects that survive will be the ones that removed off chain dependencies and single points of failure. Hayden discusses the Unification proposal approved in December that consolidated foundation work into Labs and gradually rolled out fee switches, including a recent all time high single day burn of 186,000 UNI (about $500K) with V4 fees still not yet activated. He acknowledges the UNI token price disconnect from the burn but attributes this to general crypto market correlation, expecting fundamental value to assert itself over time. On regulation, Hayden explains how the shift from the Gensler era of regulation by enforcement has already done much of the work by removing the chilling effect, and the BRCA software developer protections are the key piece he'd want enshrined in any market structure bill. He outlines how Uniswap fits into RWAs and tokenization through the internet analogy (existing assets going onchain plus crypto native assets), differentiates Uniswap's neutral spot infrastructure approach from Hyperliquid's exchange as a product approach, and previews V4 hooks being built internally to optimize for stablecoins (where Uniswap has overtaken Curve as the dominant venue), yield bearing assets, RWAs, and volatile assets, plus a focus on issuer side tools and developer API integrations. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 DeFi at a Pivotal Mainstream Adoption Moment 01:35 Why Exploits Are Surging: AI Tooling Finds Bugs 02:22 Test in Production Mentality Doesn't Work Anymore 02:46 How V3 Survived: Nine Audits and a $15M Bounty 03:31 Launching a New Version Like Launching a Rocket 03:53 DeFi Ultimately Enables Safer Applications 04:24 Off Twitter, Adoption Is the Best It's Ever Been 05:15 DeFi Will Come Out Stronger From This Stress Test 06:29 The Unification Proposal Six Months In 07:38 Gradual Fee Switch Rollout and Sensitivity Testing 08:18 All Time High Single Day Burn of 186,000 UNI 09:00 The UNI Token Price Disconnect From Burn 10:39 Fundamental Value Will Assert Itself Over Time 10:56 Regulation: From Gensler Era to New Posture 11:53 The Chilling Effect That Held Back Integration 13:14 BRCA and Software Developer _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar, Joe Lubin

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar sits down with Joe Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum, to discuss the state of the ecosystem nearly 12 years in. Joe frames Ethereum's slow but steady adoption curve as an inevitability now reaching critical mass, arguing that the fundamental reason Ethereum matters to mainstream society is that the world is composed of platforms users can be deplatformed from, and decentralized trust offers a new model where this cannot happen. He points to Hyperliquid and the agentic economy as forcing functions pushing financial institutions to be online 24/7/365. Joe addresses the recent reorganization around the Ethereum Foundation, explaining that rumors of its demise are exaggerated. He outlines an emerging architecture of multiple credibly neutral nonprofit organizations working in parallel: the Ethereum Foundation focused on cypherpunk core protocol work, a separate platform scalability group, a third group serving as the institutional user interface having spoken with around 200 financial institutions and governments, and the institutional privacy task force. He explains how value will accrue across all three layers, with Ethereum mainnet getting busy as Layer 2s, app chains, and private permissioned Besu networks proliferate, unified through synchronous composability technology being built by Linea and ZISK. Joe also announces the MetaMask agent wallet launching today in a command line version, with insurance up to $10,000 per transaction when users stay within policies. He closes with advice for Wall Street institutions on getting onchain quickly and the role of agentic interfaces in the user centric web. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 12 Years In: Are We On Track or Off Track 02:19 Why Should the World Care About Ethereum 03:12 Platforms, Deplatforming, and Decentralized Trust 04:52 Hyperliquid as a Forcing Function for 24/7 Finance 05:49 Tokenization Moving Everything Onchain 06:36 How the Ethereum Foundation Is Evolving 08:32 Credible Neutrality vs Slightly Decentralized Companies 09:47 Specializing into Multiple Nonprofit Stewards 11:36 Institutional Privacy Task Force and Other Groups 13:13 Decentralized Stewards of Ethereum 13:39 Value Accrual Across L1, L2, and Applications 14:39 Why Ethereum Pursued the Rollup Centric Roadmap 15:37 L1 Getting Busy: App Chains and Permissioned Networks 16:23 Synchronous Composability with Linea and ZISK 17:40 Unifying Fragmented Liquidity Pools 18:22 MetaMask Agent Wallet Launch 19:29 Beta Program with 200 Trading Users 20:00 Best in Class Security and Transaction Insurance 20:48 Same Product for Humans and Machines 21:31 Will UX and UI Still Matter in the Future 21:59 Voice Interfaces and Subvocalization 23:25 The Agentic Future and Digital Twins 24:31 User Centric Web Three Vision 24:50 What Wall Street Still Misunderstands 25:37 Citi, JP Morgan, and Long Time Ethereum Users 26:17 Forcing Functions Pushing Institutions Onchain 27:05 Why Banks Want Layer 1 for Bearer Instruments 27:33 ConsenSys Helping Institutions Set Up Settlement Layers 28:07 Closing Remarks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Alex Gluchowski

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Alex Gluchowski, co-founder of Matter Labs and zkSync, presents Prividium, a framework for private atomic delivery versus payment (DvP) on Ethereum. He frames DvP, a term from institutional finance meaning token swap settlement, as one of the most important and unsolved problems for institutions adopting blockchain. Alex walks through why each existing solution falls short: public chains like Ethereum have great properties but expose all positions and transactions, ruling them out for banks bound by secrecy rules. Private permissioned chains offer perfect privacy but are not interconnected, limiting their value since the whole point of blockchains is being the internet of value. External bridges connecting private chains become the de facto settlement layer with their own trust assumptions, losing the security of both origin and target chains. Mediated networks using operator attestation or fully homomorphic encryption still rely on contractual or threshold trust in operators. Alex introduces Prividium as a framework where institutions run their own cryptographically secured private chains on their own infrastructure with absolute physical data privacy, while settling on Ethereum as the credibly neutral settlement layer. Zero knowledge proofs guarantee that even a dishonest or compromised operator cannot finalize invalid transactions. He highlights the ability to deploy a smart contract once that virtually mirrors into all zones and enforces rules automatically without the issuer ever seeing the underlying data. He then walks through the technical flow of private atomic DvP: parties agree on a transaction, generate a cryptographic commitment hash, post it to a data availability layer and Ethereum settlement layer, lock assets on both sides, and use the canonical L2 state roots on Ethereum to verify execution and either release funds or revert atomically. He closes by noting the network is growing with the Kerry network consortium of five US regional banks plus participation from Deutsche Bank and other FMIs. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 What Is DvP and Why It Matters 00:48 The Tradeoffs in Existing Blockchain Solutions 01:07 Public Chains Are Too Public for Institutions 01:54 Private Chains Are Isolated and Disconnected 02:33 External Bridges Become the Settlement Layer 03:14 Mediated Networks and Their Trust Assumptions 03:35 Operator Attested and FHE Limitations 04:40 Introducing Prividium 05:09 Cryptographically Secured Private Chains on Ethereum 05:42 Permissioning, Roles, and OIDC Integration 06:16 Zero Knowledge Proofs Guarantee Execution Correctness 06:50 Rules That Apply Beyond Your Zone 07:30 The Old Way: Bilateral Agreements and Rulebooks 07:52 Virtual Mirrored Smart Contracts Enforce Rules Automatically 08:16 Why Private DvP Is the Hardest Cross Zone Example 08:51 Traditional Sequential DvP and Counterparty Risk 09:40 Atomic Swaps Collapse Settlement Risk 10:10 How Private Atomic DvP Works Step by Step 10:36 Cryptographic Commitments and Mutual Intent 11:17 Posting Commitments to DA and Settlement Layer 11:50 Locking Assets in Escrow Contracts 12:26 Reading L2 State Roots from Ethereum 12:55 Verifying Cross Chain Execution 13:25 Happy Path Release vs Revert Path 14:04 Multi Zone Chained Transactions 14:36 The Kerry Network and Growing Adoption 14:48 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Stani Kulechov

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave, frames credit as the last great frontier of the internet revolution and explains why Ethereum is uniquely positioned to solve it. Drawing on his pre-Aave experience running a fintech startup focused on receivables, Stani argues that while the internet transformed information, commerce, and communications into global systems, credit remains stubbornly local due to coordination problems across lenders, borrowers, intermediaries, localized regulation, and siloed capital. This fragmentation creates capital inefficiencies, regional interest rate discrepancies, and lost opportunities, particularly relevant today as credit historically backed industrial revolutions and will fund the next wave of AI, data centers, and infrastructure. Stani positions Ethereum as the connecting tissue and operating system that replaces manual, layered cost structures with programmable, automated infrastructure offering full transparency and execution certainty. He shares Aave's traction: over 1 trillion in cumulative loans, 3.5 trillion in cumulative deposits, and a peak of 75 billion in net deposits, proving Ethereum can support institutional scale. He explains how Aave V4's modular architecture solves the central tension between capital efficiency and risk isolation, allowing shared liquidity across pools while maintaining risk controls per market. He highlights tokenization unlocking utility for real world assets through DeFi, the bootstrapping advantages of shared pools, and the Wabi e-commerce integration as proof that fintechs and asset issuers are already moving onchain. Stani closes by predicting that the lowest cost of capital will increasingly come from DeFi as a global liquidity aggregator. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 From Fintech Receivables to Building on Ethereum 01:07 How the Internet Transformed Everything Except Credit 02:22 The Coordination Problem in Credit Markets 03:22 Regional Interest Rate Discrepancies and Capital Inefficiencies 04:41 Ethereum as the Connecting Tissue for Finance 05:21 Credit as the Backbone of Industrial Revolutions 06:40 Replacing Manual Cost Structures with Programmable Infrastructure 08:15 Pricing Risk and Reward Across End to End Markets 09:15 Aave by the Numbers: 1 Trillion in Cumulative Loans 10:27 What Works for Crypto Assets Will Work for All Finance 10:54 The Pool Model and Network Effects 11:26 Capital Efficiency vs Risk Isolation Tradeoff 12:25 Aave V4: Shared Liquidity with Isolated Risk 13:24 Solving the Bootstrapping Problem for RWAs 14:34 Tokenization Plus DeFi Utility 15:40 Why DeFi Will Offer the Lowest Cost of Capital 16:44 Wabi E-commerce Integration Case Study 17:21 Modular Infrastructure for All Asset Types 17:45 Borrowing Against Securities and Stocks Onchain 18:16 Funding the Future: AI, Data Centers, Solar Energy 19:19 Closing Remarks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Jakob Drzazga, founder of Frontier Tower, opens with the story of why he chose to build on Ethereum back in 2017: not for the price action or hype, but because of the test nets that let developers safely change the engine mid flight while ensuring everything remained solid. He uses this as a frame to ask what societies and governments would look like if they had test nets to validate policy implementations before rolling them out nationwide. He argues we currently implement things mid flight without testing, leading to uncoordinated outcomes. His mission is to build a physical test net for new governance and monetary systems. Jakob walks through Frontier Tower's progress since launching in April 2024: a 16 floor vertical village in San Francisco with capacity for 7,000 builders, organized into floors for AI, longevity, biotech, crypto (which he calls the Ethereum floor), robotics, and neurotech. In the last 12 months, 70,000 people visited, 800 became full time citizens, and they're growing 25% quarter over quarter. They've since acquired Superhero Hotel for 150 builders to co-live, and plan to scale from 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000 to 1 million citizens. He references Ray Dalio's thesis that societies survive on average 250 years, then shares observations from his China trip including Mu Shanghai's pop-up city showcasing record breaking drone shows, autonomous coffee shops, robots on the street, and China surpassing the US in blockbuster pharma deals in 2025. He attributes China's edge to its 80 year old governance system being younger and to experimentation in special economic zones like Shenzhen, Dubai, and Singapore. He advocates for startup cities and freedom cities in America. He previews two near term experiments his community will run: Frontier OS launching this year with their own stablecoin to test programmable, restricted subsidies that solve the 2021 stimulus problem where many recipients invested in crypto rather than supporting small businesses, and an AI agent based DAO experiment with Protocol Labs where each tower resident's agent reads proposals, knows their preferences and physical activity patterns, and votes accordingly. He closes with the Frontier Residency program that just ran badge zero with six startups, with one accepted to YC. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Why Test Nets Made Jakob Choose Ethereum in 2017 01:13 What If Societies Had Test Nets 01:52 Frontier Tower: A 16 Floor Vertical Village 02:19 Floors for AI, Longevity, Biotech, Crypto, Robotics 02:50 70,000 Visitors and 800 Citizens in 12 Months 03:19 Superhero Hotel and Co-Living Expansion 03:48 Scaling From 1,000 to 1 Million Citizens 04:18 Rethinking Governance From First Principles 04:18 Ray Dalio's 250 Year Society Thesis 05:06 What China Got Right 06:26 Why Younger Systems Have an Advantage 06:57 Special Economic Zones: Shenzhen, Dubai, Singapore 07:25 The Case for Startup and Freedom Cities in America 08:05 Building a City of Physical and Digital Automation 08:45 The Genius Act and Launching a Frontier Stablecoin 09:10 The 2021 Stimulus Problem 09:38 Programmable Subsidies for Local Economies 10:43 Reimagining Tax Allocation and DAOs 11:24 Why DAOs Failed When Crypto Was Only Digital 12:01 Agent Powered DAO Experiment With Protocol Labs 13:03 How Agents Solve the Proposal Fatigue Problem 13:35 Call to Action: Build a Society Test Net 14:01 RWA Real Estate Over $30 Million 14:24 IRL DAO Co-Design Opportunity 14:59 Frontier Residency Badge Zero Recap 15:40 Open Floors at the Tower 16:15 Robotizing the Building 16:30 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Dean Tribble from Agoric, one of the original Cypherpunks, presents enforceable guardrails as the missing layer for agentic finance. He frames the trajectory: financial activity is moving rapidly from humans in the loop to agents executing on behalf of people, with Fireblocks, Coinbase, Circle, and as of that morning MetaMask all rolling out APIs for agent access. The driver is smart automation that can adapt to the complexity of our evolving economy at electronic speed, and the trend is inevitable. But the central obstacle is trust. Agents are talked out of their money the same way humans are phished, and they can delete production databases or send funds to attackers who persuade them to be helpful. Dean walks through what doesn't work. After the fact auditing is too late at the speed of light, since the money is already converted and shipped offshore. Telling the agent the rules and hoping it follows them is exactly what we're trying to police. Adding additional supervisor agents to review transactions just stacks unreliable layers. Custody providers offer something useful but are themselves building non custodial solutions because custody cannot move at the speed agentic commerce requires. The answer is direct enforcement of a bounded mandate where what matters is what the agent can do, not what it wants to do. He uses the analogy of giving signing authority to your grocery shopper. Dean explains Agoric's orchestration approach where a user signs a high level mandate (which vaults are allowed, max amounts per vault, allowed chains) and submits it to a smart contract on the Agoric L1, then delegates execution to an agent that can use Twitter sentiment and APY data to propose allocations. The smart contract validates each high level intent against the mandate before executing it, coordinating cross chain activity via CCTP, Axelar, and other rails from a single auditable place. He demos YMAX, Agoric's yield optimization product, which already enables single signature cross chain capital deployment and is rolling out agentic features in alpha. He closes by reframing smart contracts as the solution to the classical principal agent problem from economics, enabling humans and AI agents to be cryptographically aligned. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 An Original Cypherpunk 00:28 The Shift From Humans to Agents in Finance 01:29 Why Agentic Finance Is Inevitable 01:59 Why You and I Need Agents to Keep Up 02:24 The Core Obstacle: Agents Can Be Talked Out of Their Money 03:12 Trust as the Number One Problem 03:40 Why After the Fact Auditing Fails 04:06 Why Telling the Agent the Rules Doesn't Work 05:09 Why Supervisor Agents Aren't the Answer 05:56 The Guardrails Problem Comes to the Forefront 06:29 Bounded Authority: What the Agent Can Do 06:49 Why Keys for Agents Is a Bad Idea 07:24 Why Custody Is Not a Complete Solution 08:38 Why Terms of Service Won't Save You 08:57 Smart Contracts as the Principal Agent Solution 09:19 Example: Yield Optimization Mandate 10:18 Strategy vs Mandate 10:57 Signing the Mandate to the Smart Contract 11:15 Why High Level Intents Beat Raw Transaction Bytes 12:24 Smart Contract Validates and Executes the Intent 12:49 The Multi Chain Execution Problem 13:06 How Agoric Orchestration Works 13:27 One Contract, Multi Step Cross Chain Action 14:00 Mandate Enforcement Across All of Web3 14:23 Orchestration Beyond One Chain 14:45 YMAX: Single Signature Yield Optimization 15:38 The Agentic Version of YMAX 16:26 Why Cross Chain Yields Beat Single Chain Yields 18:12 Alpha Status and Partner Integrations 18:28 Pulling Up: The Pattern Is the Insight 18:57 Smart Contracts Beyond Strangers Cooperating 19:15 Solving the Principal Agent Problem 19:48 Building the Trust Layer for Agentic Finance 20:28 Don't Give Your AI Keys, Give It a Mandate 20:47 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Ishan Singh from Google Cloud's digital asset team sits down with Christian Crowley, partner on the A16Z crypto go to market team, to discuss the pending Clarity Act, the future of tokenization, agentic commerce, and lessons for crypto founders selling into institutions. Christian draws on his background as a former founder who built DeFi and AI startups and the first Ethereum analytics company under the Consensys umbrella, plus his time at AWS, to explain that good go to market advice often sounds great in theory but is much less compelling in execution. His central principle for the founders he advises is reducing user friction at every step. The conversation digs into the parallel tracks of stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Christian explains that banks want the 24/7 interoperability and composability benefits but want to maintain deposit relationships and fit into existing compliance frameworks, which is why tokenized deposits will persist alongside stablecoins. Ishan previews Google Cloud's Universal Ledger product built at the protocol level for interoperability between onchain money assets. On RWAs, Christian argues tokenization itself is not the product since what matters is what the asset gains (24/7 trading, collateral mobility, interoperability), with money markets and treasuries leading early. Ishan emphasizes collateral mobility as the real killer use case for eliminating reconciliation across TradFi books and records. They debate the rails for agentic commerce, with virtual cards up 6x year over year offering an easier behavior shift while X2X and direct stablecoin payments make more sense for net new behaviors like real time compute adjustments. On the AI security tension, Christian notes that until frontier models have comprehensively reviewed existing code bases there is an unknowable set of risks in production, and the same tools attackers use are available to defenders. Ishan covers Google Cloud's MPC wallet using key shares with sub second signing across Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, and Universal Ledger. Christian closes with the most consistent founder mistake: assuming Web2 go to market lessons don't apply to Web3, when enterprises buy for clear measurable benefits, not decentralization. 00:00 Introductions 01:22 What Christian Brings to Founder Conversations 02:15 Reducing Friction as a Core Mental Model 03:14 The Clarity Act and Tokenized Deposits vs Stablecoins 04:00 Why Banks Want Tokenized Deposits 05:14 From Bank Issued Stablecoins to Integration Focus 05:56 Google Cloud Universal Ledger and Interoperability 06:26 The Trouble with the Term RWA 07:12 Tokenization Itself Is Not the Product 07:53 Why Collateral Mobility Is the Real Killer App 08:39 Eliminating Reconciliation Across TradFi 08:57 Money as Internet Packets 09:50 Legacy Distribution vs Better Technology 10:34 Rails for Agentic Commerce 11:00 Virtual Cards vs X2X and Stablecoins 11:36 Why Virtual Cards Are Easier Behavior Shifts 12:26 When Net New Behaviors Call for Open Rails 13:05 The Dark Side of AI for Web3 14:00 Founders Have Always Cared About Security 14:21 The Race Between Frontier Models and Attackers 15:14 Google Cloud MPC Wallet 15:59 Sub Second Signing Across Multiple Chains 16:41 Common Mistakes Founders Make Selling to Institutions 17:54 Why Best Technology Doesn't Always Win 18:11 The Champion's Asymmetric Risk Inside Enterprises 18:40 TradFi Budget Constraints and Quantifiable ROI 19:24 Knicks or Spurs Tonight 19:43 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Sam Jain, founder of Fluid, walks through how his team has been building DeFi infrastructure since 2018 and how Fluid is now positioned to scale tokenized assets through unified liquidity, utility, and distribution. He frames the team's origin story from an ETH Global hackathon when total DeFi TVL was below $100 million, building Instadapp which invented smart wallets, was the first user of flash loans, did extensive composability work on money Legos, and pioneered the looping strategy that now powers roughly 50% of DeFi. Constrained by being middleware on top of other protocols, the team launched Fluid in February 2024 to own the protocol layer and drive deeper algorithmic innovation. Fluid became the second largest DEX on Ethereum within 3 months of launch and the fastest DEX to reach $100 billion in volumes (in 326 days), with a peak market size of $6.5 billion. Sam positions Fluid not as just a lending market but as a capital efficient meta protocol that is already a DEX, vault, and money market and will host anything finance has to offer over the next 5 to 10 years. Every dollar on Fluid works extra mile because the total borrow to total deposits ratio has been the highest in DeFi since launch. For asset issuers facing the bootstrapping challenge of tokenizing, securing DEX liquidity, dealing with liquidity providers, and integrating with lending protocols, Fluid offers all of these at once including liquidity as a service where Fluid itself provides hundreds of millions in DEX liquidity at minimal cost without counterparty risk for the issuer. He explains how Fluid is 4 to 5x more capital efficient than competitors for liquidity depth. He shares two major partnerships: Jupiter Lend on Solana (powered by Fluid, leveraging Jupiter's distribution while Fluid provides the tech), Etherealize and Bitwise Jupiter integration that grew to half a billion within a week, and Venus Flux on BNB Chain. Sam closes by explaining that institutions can use Fluid to own their own lending protocol, DEX, and users with bespoke solutions including KYC, permissioned access, fixed rates, and credit markets, with announcements coming for both crypto centralized and TradFi onboarding partnerships. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 From 2018 Hackathon to Instadapp Origins 00:57 Inventing Smart Wallets, Flash Loans, and Looping 01:26 Why the Team Built Fluid to Own the Protocol Layer 01:55 Launching Fluid in February 2024 02:26 What Fluid Is Today and Tomorrow 02:52 Fastest DEX to $100 Billion in Volume 03:22 Highest Borrow to Deposit Ratio in DeFi 03:52 The Trillion Dollar Tokenization Opportunity 04:28 Eight Years From One Stablecoin to Thousands 05:06 The RWA Bootstrapping Challenge 05:27 Why Fluid Offers Everything at Once 05:54 Asset Issuers Already on Fluid 06:31 Liquidity as a Service for Asset Issuers 07:03 No Counterparty Risk for Issuers 07:26 Building Toward Credit Markets, Fixed Rates, Forex, Perps 08:22 What Fluid Provides Institutions 08:45 Helping TradFi Institutions Navigate DeFi 09:51 Why an Eight Year DeFi Team Matters 10:18 Partnership: Jupiter Lend on Solana 11:13 What Fluid Asks From Partners: Distribution 11:38 Partnership: Etherealize and Bitwise Jupiter 11:38 Partnership: Venus Flux on BNB Chain 12:12 Institutions Owning Their Own Lending Protocols 12:41 Bespoke Solutions: KYC, Permissioned, Fixed Rate 13:01 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Professor Ari Juels, co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), presents a lightning tour of a newly released 150 page survey on the intersection of crypto and AI, written with a long roster of co-authors. He opens by arguing that crypto and AI are not natural bedfellows. Crypto is hard: strictly programmatic and unforgiving, as shown by the Kelp DAO attack where a single poisoned message let the North Korean Lazarus group steal hundreds of millions. AI is soft: frontier models are unpredictable and error prone, like ChatGPT confidently saying raspberry has two Rs or drawing a rabbit with too many ears. Yet they can serve as middleware for each other, with Worldcoin (now World) as a proof point where crypto identity becomes essential to distinguish humans from bots in an AI saturated world. Ari walks through Crypto x AI applications where AI enhances crypto. He shows how a typical parametric flight insurance smart contract, while elegant, suffers from moral hazard and can't document actual harms, which is why AXA's Fizzy product was discontinued. By adding an LLM enhanced oracle, the same contract can ingest receipts and assess damages like real world insurance while preserving privacy. He covers AI powered investment funds, which IC3 calls coinouts (collective investment algorithms), and presents the fundamental coinout bind: either the strategy is transparent and gets front run publicly, or it's opaque and gets front run privately through covert channels. In the other direction (AI x Crypto), he addresses DePIN GPU networks with healthy skepticism, noting industry proofs of concept don't report communication or compute costs, and the largest decentralized trained model has only 40 billion parameters versus frontier models' trillions. He shows the same TEE plus LLM oracle pattern enabling confidential lending, whistleblower credentials, anonymous reviewer proofs, and code audits without revealing source. He closes with a warning about rogue agents (UAAS, unstoppable autonomous agents) that could use stablecoins to rent servers, establish censorship resistant command and control, conceal their code, and even rent humans through services like rentahuman.ai to influence the physical world. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 IC3 and the New Crypto AI Survey 00:37 Why Crypto and AI Are Not Natural Bedfellows 01:00 Crypto Is Hard: Programmatic and Unforgiving 01:52 The Kelp DAO Attack as Proof of Unforgivingness 02:41 Security Tools the Crypto Industry Has Pioneered 03:11 AI Is Soft: Unpredictable and Error Prone 04:24 World as a Proof Point of the Intersection 05:39 The Middleware Model for AI and Crypto 06:04 Crypto x AI: How AI Enhances Crypto 06:29 The Flight Insurance Smart Contract Example 07:07 Why Parametric Insurance Has Limitations 07:58 AXA's Fizzy Product and Why It Was Discontinued 07:58 Enhancing Oracles with LLMs 09:19 Hard Crypto Meets Soft AI Productively 10:02 AI Powered Investment Funds 10:36 Why First Wave AI Funds Were Mostly Hype 11:05 Coinouts: Collective Investment Algorithms 11:39 The Coinout Bind: Transparency vs Opacity 12:27 AI x Crypto: How Crypto Enhances AI 12:59 DePIN and Decentralized GPU Networks 13:50 Why DePIN Training Claims Need More Evidence 14:33 Confidential Lending with TEEs and LLMs 15:59 Other Use Cases: Whistleblowers and Anonymous Reviews 16:16 Pyred: Code Credentials Without Revealing Source 16:38 The Warning About Rogue Agents 17:05 How Stablecoins Enable Persistent Autonomous Agents 17:34 Renting Humans with Crypto 17:59 Other Topics Covered in the Survey 18:25 Five Myths and Misconceptions Debunked 18:57 Where to Read the Paper 18:57 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Odysseas Lamtzidis from Phylax presents preventative safety infrastructure for DeFi as the answer to how institutional capital can trust onchain systems without forcing the space to centralize. He frames the core security problem: in traditional finance you can always revert to an Excel sheet, but in crypto instant settlement means mistakes are irrevocable. The same property that excites investors for capital efficiency is what scares them. He defines a hack as the divergence between business logic and protocol logic, since the software is the asset and the asset is the software, where a single line of code determining ownership of billions in USDC can be rewritten by an attacker. Current security measures like monitoring are reactive, co-signers introduce centralization, and contagion turns isolated failures into systemic events. Odysseas walks through how the Kelp bridge incident cascaded into $300 million in bad debt at Aave (which had no part in the original hack), and how regulators are noticing the pattern of small groups making urgent discretionary decisions, slow responses, and accountability gaps like Circle being sued whether they freeze assets or don't. He argues for controls that are visible, automatic, and preventative, removing the human element. Phylax has built an integrated circuit breaker and evidence layer operating at the network level (block builder, validator, or sequencer) where applications register policies via smart contracts, and a sidecar drops any transaction that violates those rules. The system is transparent (rules known in advance), auditable (every decision creates records), and rules based with no human in the loop. He notes Phylax is already in production with Linea, having dropped over 4,000 transactions and protecting users from nearly $50,000 in losses. He closes by outlining a counterparty risk framework covering scope, boundaries, who can modify policies, operational integrity, incident response, and code delta from audits, urging the industry to self regulate through efforts like the Seal Framework or face violent unilateral regulation. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Why Security Is Different in DeFi 00:37 Instant Settlement Makes Mistakes Irrevocable 01:13 Defining a Hack: Business Logic vs Protocol Logic 01:36 The Software Is the Asset 02:06 Current Security: Monitoring and Co-Signers 02:26 The Cascading Threat of Contagion 02:51 Formal Verification and Runtime Enforcement 03:38 The Question Runtime Enforcement Asks 03:54 Case Study: Kelp Bridge and Aave Contagion 05:03 Aggressive Caps and Regression to Centralization 05:25 What Regulators Are Seeing 05:53 The Circle Freezing Problem 06:30 Visible, Automatic, Preventative Controls 06:58 How Phylax Works at the Network Level 07:31 The Sidecar Architecture 08:00 Three Attributes: Transparent, Auditable, Rules Based 08:21 Defining Unacceptable Economic Outcomes 09:20 Composing Deterministic and Probabilistic Signals 09:55 In Production with Linea 10:16 4,000 Transactions Dropped, $50K Protected 10:48 Counterparty Risk Is the Hidden Problem 11:19 Why Discretionary Controls Already Exist as the NYSE 11:44 Why Institutions Pulled Back After Kelp 12:09 Three Steps: Define, Enforce, Record Risk 12:41 A New Counterparty Framework 13:28 The Seal Framework and Self Regulation 14:14 Closing: Decentralization and Investor Protection Together _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Artem Brazhnikov from Octant declares Cypherpunk dead and immediately revives it, framing crypto's institutional era as the beginning rather than the end of the movement that started in the 80s and 90s around privacy and cryptography. Drawing on Buckminster Fuller's quote that you never change things by fighting reality but by building a new model that makes the existing one obsolete, Artem argues the path forward is building bridges to institutions rather than burning them. He acknowledges nostalgia in the community for the 2018 era of hoodies and Berlin hard forks while insisting Ethereum is the same substrate whether you wear a hoodie or a collar shirt. Artem identifies architectural vulnerabilities in security, privacy, and identity as the central problem, citing 2025's $292 million Kelp DAO exploit, $13 billion withdrawn from Aave in 48 hours, and over $800 million stolen across the year. He warns that AI is rewriting the threat model with bugs being found exponentially faster (including a Zcash bug sitting since 2022 only recently found by AI), and that traditional institutions built for human attackers cannot keep up with billions of agents executing trillions of transactions at light speed. The only answer he sees is zero knowledge cryptography that proves computation without revealing inputs. He argues paradoxically that the architectural decisions Cypherpunks have made for decades (decentralization, credible neutrality, verifiability, operational resilience demonstrated by Ethereum's 11 years of zero downtime) are exactly what institutions now need. He closes by presenting Octant's model: a self sustaining funding engine where the Golem Foundation's 100,000 staked ETH generates yield to fund ecosystem grants (over 130 projects and $18 million distributed in 3 years) without ever spending the principal. He introduces Octa Vaults built on ERC-4626 as perpetual endowments enabling yield powered giving, Octa Grants as the allocation layer using quadratic funding and other models, and the V2 launch coming next week. He reframes web3 as not about ownership but co-ownership of shared state, since users own keys not assets, and that public infrastructure must stay funded for everyone to keep 24/7 access. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 What Is Cypherpunk 00:33 Cypherpunk Is Dead, Long Live Cypherpunk 01:23 Build a New Model Instead of Fighting the Old 01:52 Adoption Is Not the End of Cypherpunk Ethos 02:26 Nostalgia for the 2018 Berlin Hard Fork Era 02:50 Security and Privacy Are Architectural Problems 03:14 Honeypots and Bridge Vulnerabilities 03:38 2025's Exploits: Kelp, Aave, $800M Stolen 04:11 AI Is Rewriting the Threat Model 04:40 The Zcash Bug Found by AI After Three Years 05:07 Why Institutions Built for Human Attackers Will Fail 05:33 The Old Model: Service Agreements and Legal Recourse 05:57 Why Old Institutions Cannot Keep Up With Agents 06:22 Zero Knowledge Cryptography as the Answer 06:52 Cypherpunk Tech Is What Wall Street Needs 07:16 Credible Neutrality and Counterparty Risk 07:41 Verifiability and Ethereum's 11 Years of Uptime 08:20 Why the Ethereum Foundation's Role Is Narrowing 08:41 The Need for New Coordination Models 09:18 Digital Asset Treasuries as Long Term Funders 09:46 Octant: A Self Sustaining Funding Engine 10:11 How 100,000 Staked ETH Powers Grants 11:00 130 Projects, $18 Million Distributed in 3 Years 11:29 Octa Vaults as Perpetual Endowments 12:32 Yield as Insurance Against Loss 12:56 Yield Power Giving Without Spending Principal 12:56 Octa Grants and the Allocation Layer 13:54 V2 Launch Next Week 14:20 Web3 Is About Co-Ownership, Not Ownership 14:50 You Own Keys, Not Assets 15:20 Preserving the Properties We Built On 15:45 ZK-EVM and Verifiable AI Inference 16:14 The Moment Is Ripe for Institutions 16:48 Closing: Building Together for the Next Thousand Years _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, William Mougayar from TRUSTSHIFT, who has been in the blockchain space for 14 years, presents a new framework for valuing Ethereum comprehensively as public goods infrastructure rather than just another crypto token. He opens by addressing a vexing problem: crypto valuations are not driven by fundamentals but by external factors like Middle East wars, inflation, US dollar strength, Nvidia earnings, and liquidity availability. His thesis is that misvaluation persists because there is no one size fits all, and Ethereum specifically requires a different framework than DeFi protocols (which use TVL, fees, treasury), revenue chains like Tempo and Solana (which use discounted cash flow), or Bitcoin (which positions as digital gold). William argues a critical mistake people make is trying to separate ETH the asset from Ethereum the platform. The reality is four E's: Ethereum the platform, ETH the asset, the Ethereum Foundation, and the ecosystem, all working synergistically. He draws an extended analogy to the early internet, recalling his 1995 internet book Opening Digital Markets when eyeballs were the primary metric. Just as internet valuation evolved over decades, Ethereum is still early in its valuation maturity. Applying internet valuation methodology, he breaks Ethereum value into three buckets: captured value (fees), economic flow (ETH as a currency, like digital oil), and the trust surplus (the unpriced value users would have paid minus what they actually pay), estimated at $50 to $150 per user across 20 to 30 million meaningful users, plus systemic value from fraud reduction, less counterparty risk, and settlement efficiencies. The math lands Ethereum's fair value at minimum $1 trillion, implying an ETH price around $8,000, roughly four times current levels. He highlights that Ethereum already settles $3 trillion in stablecoin transfers per month without being the fastest chain, proving valuation is about economic settlement not TPS. He closes by arguing Ethereum's value should be measured like the US dollar's role in oil and trade, not by short term revenue, since just as no one values the internet by packet fees, no one should value Ethereum purely by transaction fees. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Reframing How to Value Ethereum 01:13 Why Crypto Valuations Are Not Driven by Fundamentals 02:29 Segmenting the Crypto Space 02:57 Why DeFi Is the Most Advanced in Quantifying Fundamentals 03:21 Revenue Chains: Tempo and Solana 03:49 Bitcoin as a Special Snowflake 04:09 Why Separating ETH from Ethereum Is Wrong 04:48 The Four E's of Ethereum 05:18 The Internet Analogy: From Eyeballs to Platforms 06:45 Structural Similarities Between Ethereum and the Internet 07:41 Why More Value Is Created at the Application Layer 08:20 Why Tether Overtaking ETH Wouldn't Be Bad 09:10 The Three Buckets of Internet Value 10:04 Search and Email Consumer Surplus 11:07 Three Properties of Public Goods 12:01 Applying the Framework to Ethereum 12:27 ETH as Digital Oil 12:49 Estimating the Trust Surplus per User 13:28 Systemic Value: Settlement, Fraud Reduction, Counterparty Risk 14:00 The Math: $1 Trillion Valuation, $8,000 ETH 14:38 Why the Internet Was Also Doubted Before 2000 15:26 Why Markets Continue to Mispric Ethereum 15:48 Why L2 L1 Relationships Aren't Value Extractive 15:48 Ethereum Settles $3 Trillion in Stablecoins Monthly 16:23 The Paradigm Shift: Flow Based vs Fee Based 16:45 Why ETH Is Like the US Dollar 17:33 You Don't Value the Internet by Packet Fees 17:53 Closing: It's All About Trust _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Ashley Stanhope from Hardfork Media sits down with Vivek Raman, founder of Etherealize, to discuss the institutional case for Ethereum, the Ethereum versus permissioned chain debate, and his firm's ambitious ETH price thesis. Vivek frames the current moment as the strongest blockchain bull market he's seen even amid a token bear market, arguing that the value proposition of public blockchains has never been stronger. When he launched Etherealize in 2025, Ethereum was still in proof of concept mode on Wall Street with a missing narrative, but adoption, regulation, and institutional readiness have since converged. He points to the legacy architecture of the financial system (COBOL, Excel, faxes, wires) as ripe for an upgrade, and identifies three unlocks that made institutions comfortable: Ethereum's 10 year track record with no downtime, institutional proof points like BlackRock's BUIDL and 60% of stablecoins living on Ethereum, and a favorable regulatory environment marked by the Genius Act becoming the starting line. Vivek explains Etherealize's dual mandate of educating Wall Street on why Ethereum's neutrality and decentralization matter while building the missing building blocks (bespoke tokenization reaching back offices, privacy infrastructure layered on top rather than embedded, and applications). He reframes decentralization for institutions as security, resilience, and the absence of single points of failure, noting the irony that institutions are the biggest customers of decentralization because centralized chains carry counterparty risk and lower profitability. He argues Solana never comes up in institutional conversations, and that the real debate is public permissionless versus permissioned consortium chains, where Ethereum's modularity lets institutions have their cake and eat it too through specialized L2s and app chains. He walks through his Productive Money report and its $250,000 ETH target, explaining that markets misprice blockchains by valuing them on fees like companies rather than recognizing ETH as the monetary asset securing the network, with the real repricing coming when ETH is valued alongside gold and Bitcoin. He closes noting you don't have to hold ETH to use Ethereum, and that while the Clarity Act would be welcome, Ethereum already transcends the political cycle thanks to the Genius Act being law. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 A Token Bear Market but a Blockchain Bull Market 00:29 Why Etherealize Launched in 2025 00:55 The Value Proposition Is Stronger Than Ever 01:45 What Banks Are Saying About Ethereum 01:52 Upgrading Legacy Financial Architecture 02:52 Why Regulation Gave Institutions Confidence 03:14 Three Unlocks: Track Record, Pilots, Regulation 03:51 The Genius Act as the Starting Line 04:31 Etherealize's Dual Mandate 04:54 Why a Neutral Platform Wins 05:32 Educating Wall Street on Decentralization 05:56 Building the Missing Building Blocks 06:27 Bespoke Tokenization for Back Offices 06:54 Privacy as a Layer on Top 07:13 Applications and Use Cases 07:45 Does Decentralization Resonate With Wall Street 08:10 Why Institutions Are the Biggest Customers of Decentralization 08:55 Why Not Just Use AWS 09:11 Supporting the EF's CROPS Focus 09:48 Ethereum vs Solana in Institutional Conversations 10:44 Permissionless vs Permissioned Consortium Chains 11:12 Can You Have a Hybrid Approach 11:37 Ethereum's Modularity and the Internet Analogy 12:12 Why the Layer 2 Model Is Not Dead 12:32 Institutions Choosing Layer 2s vs Their Own Chains 13:26 Abstracting Away the L1 vs L2 Distinction 13:54 One Hop to Liquidity on the Base Layer 14:13 The Productive Money Report 14:39 Why People Value Blockchains Incorrectly 15:31 Why Every Blockchain Needs a Core Asset 15:49 ETH as the Best Money in the Ecosystem 16:28 Repricing ETH Alongside Gold and Bitcoin 16:47 A Call Option on Money 17:10 Do You Have to Hold ETH to Support Ethereum 17:42 Something in It for Everyone 18:17 Clarity Act Predictions 18:38 Why Ethereum Transcends the Political Cycle 18:59 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Steven Goldfeder

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Amanda Cassatt from Serotonin sits down with Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, to discuss Arbitrum's origins, the evolving role of L2s, and how institutions are reshaping the Ethereum ecosystem. Steven traces Arbitrum back to a fall 2014 Princeton class project led by his co-founder Ed, nearly a year before Ethereum went live, when it was a purely academic pursuit around scaling the theorized concept of smart contracts. Years later, when platforms hit real scaling issues, he and co-founders Ed and Harry took the vision out of the ivory tower. On Vitalik's comment that the rollup centric roadmap no longer makes sense and that an L2 which doesn't fully decentralize is just a vampiric L1 with a bridge, Steven welcomes Ethereum ending its neutral stance toward chains that latched onto the brand without being secured by it, noting Arbitrum was built from day one with proofs connecting it to Ethereum. Steven identifies two major shifts. First, Arbitrum built its own identity, evolving from Ethereum users wanting a cheaper path to majority Arbitrum first users drawn by deep liquidity, apps like GMX, and 250 millisecond block times, making it a top five blockchain by economic activity. Second, L2s now have a purpose independent from scaling: institutions want their own chains for branding, compliance, and privacy, choosing between their own L1 (Stripe's Tempo, Circle's Arc) or an Ethereum L2 (Robin Hood on Arbitrum, Coinbase's Base). He argues Ethereum is the only L1 that can cater to them through the L2 model. He uses Robin Hood's landlord versus tenant framing, explains why fading into invisible infrastructure is best for global adoption (the cat video on AWS versus GCP analogy), and notes the Arbitrum DAO still collects 10% of Robin Hood chain revenue. He covers solving fragmentation through smart routing addresses and ZeroDev chain abstraction, his view that AI agents are closer to a Sybil attack than a solution, his bullishness on non financial use cases like prediction markets and USDA's AI hardware lending, and how Offchain connects institutions to Ethereum while the Foundation stays focused on CROPS. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 From Aspiring Professor to Founding Arbitrum 01:01 The Fall 2014 Princeton Class Project 01:43 Taking Arbitrum Out of the Ivory Tower 02:12 Is Vitalik Right About the Rollup Centric Roadmap 02:41 Why Ethereum Ended Its Neutral Brand Stance 03:09 How Arbitrum Was Built Connected to Ethereum 03:30 Two Core Things That Have Changed 03:48 From Ethereum First to Arbitrum First Users 04:23 Arbitrum as a Top Five Blockchain 04:44 Why L2s Have a Purpose Independent of Scaling 05:26 Institutions Choosing L1 vs L2 05:54 Why Ethereum Is the Only L1 That Can Fight 06:30 Offchain's Role in Scaling the Layer 1 07:11 Is the Case for L2s Now Institutional Onboarding 07:45 Why Institutions Want Their Own Branded Chains 08:15 Owning the Chain to Collect Fee Revenue 08:40 The Landlord vs Tenant Strip Mall Analogy 09:29 What Is Arbitrum in the Landlord Metaphor 10:06 The Risks and Rewards of Invisible Infrastructure 10:46 Fueling Robin Hood's International Expansion 11:28 The Cat Video on AWS Analogy 11:48 Why the DAO Still Benefits in Dollars and Cents 12:13 Fragmentation Across L2s and L3s 12:45 Smart Routing Addresses and Chain Abstraction 13:52 Why Taking a Step Back Enables Going Forward 14:39 Will AI Agents Solve Fragmentation 15:32 Why Agents Add Usage Rather Than Solve It 16:03 Smart Wallets With Policies for Agents 16:48 Will Users Know They're Using Arbitrum in 10 Years 17:11 Why Escape Hatches Matter Even If Unused 18:11 Blockchain Gaming as an Example 18:58 Getting the Benefits Without Engaging the Details 19:17 Why the Right to Self Sovereignty Always Matters 20:01 Bullish on Non Financial Use Cases 20:34 Why Arbitrum Has Been Finance Focused From the Start 21:08 Prediction Markets and USDA AI Hardware Lending 21:49 What the Programmable Economy Really Means 22:16 How Arbitrum's Mission Fits Ethereum's Values 22:44 Believing in CROPS and Decentralization 23:30 Offchain as the Business Conduit for Institutions 24:06 A Harmonious Ecosystem With the Ethereum Foundation 24:27 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, William Mougayar from TRUSTSHIFT sits down with Chris Giancarlo, former chairman of the CFTC and current member of Patomak Global Partners, known as "Crypto Dad" for his early advocacy that let Bitcoin futures list on regulated US exchanges in 2017. Chris shares his origin story of coming out of the financial crisis at a swaps trading platform, working through Dodd-Frank rules for five years, then being nominated by President Obama to the CFTC where he served with Sharon Bowen. He recounts how in 2017 Bitcoin was trading around $1,000 and the CME approached him wanting to list Bitcoin futures. Despite intense opposition from the entire financial establishment (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and others calling to shut it down), Chris famously testified to the Senate that "my son is interested in Bitcoin, and I owe it to him to try to understand it," which became a viral moment that gave him the nickname Crypto Dad. The conversation moves to the current regulatory landscape and Chris's vision for what he calls "regulation 2.0." He argues the previous era of regulation was built for an analog world of intermediaries and paper based settlement, but the digital age requires principles based, technology neutral frameworks that can adapt to programmable money, tokenized assets, and 24/7 markets. He praises the current administration's approach with the Genius Act, the Clarity Act working its way through Congress, and the SEC's Crypto Task Force under Chairman Atkins moving away from regulation by enforcement. Chris emphasizes that the US is finally embracing its role as the global leader in digital finance rather than pushing innovation offshore. He shares his optimism about tokenized real world assets, stablecoins as an extension of US dollar dominance, and the convergence of TradFi and DeFi. He closes with advice for builders: engage with regulators early, be transparent about your business model, and focus on solving real problems for real users rather than chasing regulatory arbitrage. 00:00 Introduction 00:15 The Crypto Dad Origin Story 01:24 From Financial Crisis to CFTC Nomination 02:38 The 2017 Bitcoin Futures Decision 03:52 CME Approaches the CFTC 05:04 Wall Street Opposition to Bitcoin Futures 06:17 The Senate Testimony That Went Viral 07:31 My Son Is Interested in Bitcoin 08:44 Becoming Known as Crypto Dad 09:58 The Analog Era of Financial Regulation 11:12 Why the Digital Age Needs Regulation 2.0 12:26 Principles Based and Technology Neutral Frameworks 13:41 The Genius Act and Clarity Act Progress 14:55 The SEC Crypto Task Force Under Chairman Atkins 16:09 Moving Away From Regulation by Enforcement 17:24 US Embracing Global Leadership in Digital Finance 18:38 Tokenized Real World Assets 19:51 Stablecoins Extending US Dollar Dominance 21:04 The Convergence of TradFi and DeFi 22:18 Advice for Builders 23:32 Engaging With Regulators Early 24:45 Focus on Real Problems for Real Users 25:59 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this brief opening, Kartik Talwar, co-founder of ETHGlobal, welcomes over 2,000 attendees to day two of ETHConf at the Javits Center. He reiterates that ETHConf is the first and biggest institutional Ethereum event in America, run by ETH Global with the goal of promoting the Ethereum ecosystem and getting the smartest people in the world building on the hardest problems in the space. New York was chosen intentionally to bring together the finance world with the broader crypto community, connecting DeFi and TradFi founders alongside builders working on cryptography and distributed systems so both sides can readily collaborate. Kartik previews day two's structure across three continuing themes: how institutions are thinking about adopting stablecoins and DeFi in their day to day flows, how protocols are evolving from an engineering perspective (what's still outstanding, what's being worked on, what to expect in the coming months and years), and how these two threads connect to make it easy for everyone else to come on chain by simplifying UX, technical, and regulatory hurdles at scale. He emphasizes that speakers coming on stage will talk about work they've already shipped rather than work they're just thinking about, and encourages attendees to interact directly with founders throughout the day since decisions happen faster when you can chat with the people building the products. 00:00 Welcome to Day Two of ETHConf 00:30 Why New York and Why Institutional Focus 00:58 Bringing DeFi and TradFi Together 01:23 2,000 Attendees and 150 Speakers 01:51 Day Two Themes: Institutions, Protocols, Adoption 02:20 Real Stuff on Stage, Not Concepts 02:39 Meet Founders Throughout the Day 02:57 Kicking Off the First Talk _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Lukas Helminger from TACEO presents a problem his team discovered in recent weeks: why institutional custody breaks on shielded chains. TACEO is building a network for encrypted compute focused on the identity and finance layers. He frames the stakes by looking at the scale of custody today, citing Coinbase holding roughly $300 billion in assets under custody at the market's height (including most ETFs), BitGo not far behind, and Fireblocks securing around $10 trillion in transaction volume across over 2,000 institutions. This makes institutional custody critically important to crypto itself. He then surveys the privacy renaissance of recent months, highlighting ZK based projects like Aleo, Aztec, Midnight, Miden, and Zcash, plus Ethereum's roadmap toward client side proving. All of these models assume self custody, where you hold your own key and run your own prover so the secret never leaves your hands for maximum privacy. Lukas explains the tension: the institutional world cannot rely on a single entity holding a key, since that creates unacceptable risk for regulated entities. State of the art institutional custody instead splits the key into shares (for example a customer share, a custodian share, and a backup share) so no party ever holds the whole secret, and uses threshold signatures, a form of multi-party computation, to authorize transactions without ever reconstructing the key in one place, with ECDSA being a commonly thresholdized algorithm. The problem is that on shielded chains, transactions are authorized not by signatures but by zero knowledge proofs, which are far more complex, and none of the existing custodians have a way to thresholdize a ZK proof. He presents the solution from academia: collaborative SNARKs (co-SNARKs), introduced about four years ago by Dan Boneh and Alex, which place the zero knowledge proof inside a multi-party computation protocol so the entire proving system is thresholdized, producing a proof indistinguishable from a standard one that verifies on chain without protocol changes. He shares that TACEO has been building this for over two and a half years, with a network live for two months doing 100,000 transactions per day across private payments, yield, and tokenization, and tooling for co-Circom and Noir with surprisingly low performance overhead. He closes inviting custodians who need to onboard shielded assets to talk, since this is a key unaddressed blocker to bringing privacy to institutions. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 What TACEO Is Building 00:30 A Problem Hidden in Plain Sight 00:52 The Scale of Custody Today 01:25 Fireblocks and $10 Trillion in Volume 01:52 The Privacy Renaissance 02:32 Why These Models Assume Self Custody 02:57 Why Single Key Custody Fails Institutions 03:24 How State of the Art Custody Splits Keys 04:01 Threshold Signatures and Multi-Party Computation 04:35 Why ECDSA Is Commonly Thresholdized 05:08 Where Things Break in the ZK World 05:43 Collaborative SNARKs From Academia 06:17 How Co-SNARKs Thresholdize Proving 06:39 How Far TACEO Has Come 07:11 Tooling for Co-Circom and Noir 07:30 Why the Performance Overhead Is Low 07:51 A Call to Custodians 08:26 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, James Kurz from the Filecoin Foundation argues that in the generational AI buildout, the moat is where your data lives, and storage is the underappreciated part of the story. He opens with a history lesson: 10 to 20 years ago compute was cheap and you simply put hard drives where the people were, in Northern Virginia or the Bay Area. Today compute dominates the conversation, but the coming five years will see an explosion of data collection about the physical world for AI training and inference, driven by robotics, neurotech, and self-driving cars, capturing far more than the tiny fraction humanity has stored over the past 30 to 40 years. This demands vastly more storage capacity. James explains the core shift: historically compute went to the data because data was heavy, but now compute is being dragged to wherever cheap power exists, places like Wyoming, northern Norway, Finland, and Ohio that were never the interconnection points of the internet. This creates storage deserts, where major GPU clusters are being built far from where storage lives. When data sits far from GPUs, you hit the laws of physics (fiber optic speed and node hops) that hardware cannot solve, plus the steep economic cost of data egress from providers like AWS, and vendor lock-in where moving data into one cloud traps you there. He stresses that keeping data physically close to compute is really about the cost of iteration: whoever can run more tests and checkpoints faster outpaces competitors, and jurisdictional compliance adds another reason to have distributed storage near the clusters. He argues incumbents will not solve this since hyperscalers work at massive scale and focus on GPU buildouts, creating an opportunity for local and colocated storage operators to be the fast, close data layer without buying their own GPUs. He positions Filecoin as already being this global network, built over five or six years with almost 2 exabytes of capacity and cryptoeconomics that flex capacity up, letting users leverage existing capex rather than spending billions, while tapping underutilized storage devices amid hard drive order books extending beyond 2027. He closes by introducing two ways to try Filecoin in 2026: FilecoinWarm Storage as an S3 compatible endpoint (live in the EU, coming to North America and Asia) and Filecoin onchain cloud for developers wanting programmatic smart contract storage. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Have You Tried Fable 5 and Filecoin 00:50 A History Lesson: When Compute Was Cheap 01:10 Why Storage Is the Underappreciated Story 01:30 The Coming Explosion of AI Data 01:53 How Little Data We've Captured So Far 02:11 Why We Need Much More Storage 02:30 Bringing Compute to Where the Power Is 02:53 Why Storage Deserts Are Emerging 03:14 Storage Deserts Are Happening Now 03:48 Why Distance to GPUs Hits the Laws of Physics 04:22 The Steep Cost of Data Egress 04:41 How Egress Fees Create Vendor Lock-In 05:09 Why Close Data Wins the Iteration Cycle 05:54 Why Incumbents Won't Solve This 06:27 The Opportunity for Local Storage Operators 07:01 The Jurisdiction and Compliance Angle 07:52 Why Filecoin Already Is This Network 08:13 Leveraging Billions in Existing Capex 08:51 Why an Agnostic Cloud Matters 09:32 Why You Need to Move Data Quickly 09:52 Filecoin's 2 Exabytes of Global Capacity 10:37 Activating Underutilized Storage Everywhere 11:05 Two Ways to Try Filecoin in 2026 11:24 FilecoinWarm Storage as an S3 Swap 11:47 Filecoin Onchain Cloud for Developers 12:26 Why Data Is the Key to the AI Buildout 13:10 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Mike Cahill, CEO of Douro Labs (the team building the Pyth Network), explains why markets need a new price setup and how Pyth makes the price of everything accessible to everyone. He recounts how about five years ago, while at Jump Trading with co-founders Jan and Kieran, he went deep into market infrastructure trying to figure out how to build a global harmonized market for trading real world assets on and off chain, and found the biggest bottleneck was financial market data. That industry generates around $50 billion in annual revenue but is siloed, fragmented, and dominated by Bloomberg charging $30,000 per seat as a basic package, with premium feeds like CME, NASDAQ level two, and ICE layered on top, requiring relationships and audits with hundreds of vendors worldwide. Mike explains that while this mess worked for existing markets, it breaks for blockchain-based cleared markets, which are global, programmable (requiring cryptographic proofs to preserve trust), and 24/7. Pyth solves this with a marketplace connecting data publishers to consumers, aggregating information while preserving trust and publishing proofs to any blockchain. The first-principles unlock was sourcing high quality data from major trading firms like Jump, Jane Street, and Susquehanna that had never monetized this byproduct, then anonymizing and stitching it together, making Pyth the first original price source rather than just an oracle. He shares the scale: over 100 institutions publishing data, delivery to over 100 blockchains, every asset class covered, powering more than 60% of perpetuals markets, $3 trillion in transaction volume, over 700 enterprises, and 3,000+ symbols. He walks through three product verticals: Pyth Pro (the Spotify for market data, one ever-growing subscription, adding $1 million monthly ARR toward $20 million by year end), a data marketplace (born from publishing US Department of Commerce GDP data on chain, now launched with Euronext, SGX, and OTC Markets), and new 24/7 markets that harmonize off-chain and on-chain trading into seamless indices. He closes announcing the 24/7 indices launching that week with Coinbase, Kraken, dYdX, and Market Vector as first users, after Pyth oil saw insatiable demand. 00:00 Introduction 00:35 The Problem Pyth Set Out to Solve 00:55 Where Pyth Is Today 01:17 The Bottleneck of Financial Market Data 01:38 A $50 Billion Siloed Industry 01:58 Bloomberg and the Basic Cable Model 02:19 Hundreds of Vendors and Audits 02:38 Why It Breaks on Blockchains 03:00 Why Blockchains Need a New Approach 03:22 The Pyth Marketplace Model 03:41 Rethinking Data Sourcing From First Principles 04:01 Tapping Trading Firms' Unmonetized Data 04:18 Why Pyth Is More Than an Oracle 04:35 Creating an Original Price Source 04:45 The Scale of the Network Today 05:03 Every Asset Class Covered 05:32 The Publishing Side of the Network 05:55 Sourcing the Best in Each Category 06:22 The Three Product Verticals 06:43 Pyth Pro: The Spotify for Market Data 07:15 The Data Marketplace Vertical 07:40 The Pyth Terminal 08:03 Pyth Pro Scaling Toward $20 Million ARR 08:31 Powering Kalshi Without On-Chain Proofs 08:57 Pyth Pro Video 09:26 A Reminder of the Scale 09:47 The Marketplace and the US Commerce Collaboration 10:10 Publishing GDP On Chain 10:35 Launching With Euronext, SGX, and OTC Markets 10:58 Introducing 24/7 Markets 11:24 How Pyth Constructs 24/7 Indices 11:50 From Pyth Oil to Equities, Metals, and FX 12:00 Launching This Week With Coinbase, Kraken, dYdX 12:43 Why 24-Hour Markets Will Be the Norm 12:43 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Justin Gainsley, who leads stablecoin payment acceptance at Coinbase, shares what four years of building stablecoin payments at scale has taught him about selling to enterprises and payment service providers, and what still needs to be accomplished. He opens with a 2012 Hacker News post from Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong, written before he even applied to Y Combinator, expressing the idea of using crypto to remove the 2 to 3% interchange tax Visa and Mastercard charge on every payment, showing crypto as a payment method has been ingrained in Coinbase from the start. Taking over Coinbase Commerce with the same mandate, Justin's team tried nearly everything (Bitcoin payments, every token on every chain, memecoins, cashback, point of sale, invoicing, online checkout) but nothing moved the needle, and for a while they worried crypto might not be right for payments. The signal emerged from talking to hundreds of buyers and merchants: a real cohort wanted crypto as their cash, something stable to earn into and spend without gas or volatility. So Coinbase made the non-consensus bet of stripping out Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all volatile assets to go all in on stablecoins, which drew internal backlash but sent conversion, volume, and merchant satisfaction all up. Strikingly, 64% of wallets paying on the stablecoin only product held no other assets, a fundamentally new cohort of savers rather than traders. Justin recounts bringing what they thought was the industry's best stablecoin checkout to Shopify, only to be asked about auth and capture, a term he had never heard, kicking off a year of learning what a real payment system requires: authorization holds, automated voids, configurable expiries, refunds, settlement schemes, reconciliation, and disputes. He details the resulting open source Commerce Payments Protocol, an escrow smart contract on Base powering Shopify's USDC checkout across hundreds of thousands of sites, with a permissionless operator role, six operations (authorize, capture, charge, void, refund, reclaim), and a blockchain native reclaim function letting buyers pull funds back after expiry. He covers the boring but required enterprise needs (predictable flat gas fees, custom settlement files, daily fiat delivery, compliance), argues the blockchain itself is fine for payments since Base settles in 200 milliseconds for under a penny, and identifies wallets, on-ramps, and signing UX as the real problems. He closes noting stablecoin payments have gone from curiosity to production in two years. 00:00 Introduction 00:41 Brian Armstrong's 2012 Post on Removing Interchange 01:09 Why Crypto Payments Are in Coinbase's DNA 01:35 Trying Everything to Make Crypto Payments Work 02:00 Worrying Crypto Might Not Fit Payments 02:23 Listening Closely to Buyers and Merchants 02:41 The Camp That Wanted Crypto as Cash 03:06 The Non-Consensus Bet on Stablecoins 03:35 The Internal Backlash 03:58 Why All the Metrics Went Up 04:28 64% of Wallets Held No Other Assets 04:54 The New Cohort of Savers 05:14 Bringing the Best Checkout to Shopify 05:32 The Auth and Capture Question 06:08 A Year Learning What Payments Require 06:32 Why Not to Underestimate Traditional Payments 07:15 Plugging Into Where Enterprises Already Are 07:37 The Commerce Payments Protocol on Base 08:01 How the Escrow Smart Contract Works 08:28 The Operator Role Explained 08:46 Why Operators Cannot Modify or Lock Funds 09:28 The Six Core Operations 09:48 Reclaim as a Blockchain Native Feature 10:12 The Boring but Required Enterprise Needs 10:33 Predictable Flat Gas Fees 10:44 Custom Settlement Files per PSP 11:01 Daily Fiat Delivery and Compliance 11:26 Just Another Alternative Payment Method 11:54 What the Industry Still Needs 12:19 Why the Blockchain Is Fine for Payments 12:42 Where Wallet UX Kills Conversion 13:03 Why On-Ramps Still Need to Be Better 13:27 Signing UX and Smart Wallet Adoption 13:59 From Curiosity to Production in Two Years 14:41 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mooly Sagiv

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Mooly Sagiv from Certora presents how LLM generated formal specifications can help prevent the next DeFi hack. He frames the problem: coding agents are increasingly replacing software engineers, but hackers are winning, and even with excellent auditing firms and tooling the industry cannot find all bugs. The situation will worsen as every new AI model release creates new threats while code grows more complex. He critiques the informal approach to intent taken by companies like Anthropic, arguing intent should not be handled informally, and proposes agentic formal verification as the solution. He pushes back on the myth that formal verification is intractable or requires a PhD, arguing the real hard problem is not computation but formal specification: verification is only as good as the properties you specify, which is why teams that claim to be formally verified still get hacked, since they verified the wrong property. Mooly explains Certora's new open source, token based tool that bridges the gap between informal and formal specs. A developer writes intent informally (for example keep the balance safe), and the tool automatically generates a formal invariant (the sum of balances equals the total), which can then be proven or tested. The tool is agnostic to Certora's own prover, works with tools like Rocq, Lean, and Halmos, and fits into the development cycle before an audit through an interactive human-in-the-loop process, including a design hardening agent that makes designs more verification ready from the design document stage. He demos a toy counter contract with a trivial bug, showing how the tool generates properties in English, proves two of three rules, surfaces the bug, and validates the fix with a mathematical guarantee that future LLM versions cannot break. He then shows a real anonymized gambling protocol audited before deployment, where the tool automatically inferred 15 properties, found a real violation confirmed by their team, and suggested a validated fix. He closes on the product launching July 15 (Solidity only, GPL3, generating Foundry tests and including static analysis and bug finding at around $300 per run), and two takeaways: AI is why formal verification finally matters, and AI is also what makes formal verification easy by translating prover output into human understandable explanations. 00:00 Introduction 00:56 A Talk for Coders and Non-Coders Alike 01:18 How Coding Agents Are Replacing Software 01:47 Why Auditing and Tools Cannot Find All Bugs 02:28 Why Informal Intent Is the Wrong Approach 02:40 Introducing Agentic Formal Verification 03:05 Making Formal Verification as Easy as Testing 03:29 A History of Formal Verification and Its Myths 04:01 Why Intractability Is a Myth 04:32 Why Verification Depends on Specification 04:52 Why Verified Code Still Gets Hacked 05:11 How LLMs Help Find Formal Specifications 05:29 From Intent to Invariant 06:35 Beyond Verification: Generating Tests 07:07 How It Fits Into the Development Cycle 07:30 A Tool to Use Before the Audit 07:59 Why Getting Properties Right Is Hardest 08:37 Inside the Tool: Agnostic to the Prover 09:30 Hardening the Design for Verification 10:06 The Audit Agent and Security Review 10:44 Plugging In Rocq, Lean, and Halmos 11:01 Two Examples: Toy and Real 11:34 The Toy Counter Contract Bug 11:55 How the Agent Finds Properties in English 12:34 Proving Rules and Surfacing the Bug 12:57 Why a Violation Could Be Code or Spec 13:30 Validating the Fix With a Proof 14:26 Applying the Tool to Real Code 14:45 A Real Protocol Audited Before Deployment 15:20 How the Tool Inferred 15 Properties 16:25 The Paused Contract Condition It Caught 17:00 Finding and Confirming a Real Bug 17:33 Validating the Suggested Fix 18:04 The Status of the Tool 18:49 The July 15 Product Launch 19:40 Pricing Around $300 per Run 20:19 Two Surprising Takeaways 20:47 Why AI Made Formal Verification Matter 21:06 How AI Makes Formal Verification Easy 22:33 Closing and Call to Try the Tool _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Thibauld Favre, CTO and co-founder of Fairmint, introduces the Open Cap Table Protocol and argues why the private market, not the public one, is where onchain equity infrastructure will win. He opens on how the new administration reshuffled the deal for crypto by opening the floodgates for asset tokenization, and Wall Street heard the message loud and clear, with the DTCC and market participants now scrambling to tokenize everything. As a 16 year crypto veteran, he asks whether all that work is being co-opted by Wall Street to build faster horses, and answers no. Everything Wall Street tokenizes today is public equity, which works because of an old, complex mainframe based infrastructure centered on the DTCC monopoly for post trade operations. That system works (you click a button on Robinhood and the trade settles despite nine intermediaries), so the low hanging fruit is simply adding another layer to sell US securities offshore, which changes nothing fundamental. Thibauld argues the real wedge is the private market, which is exploding as staying private grows more attractive: secondaries now rival IPO proceeds, there are over a thousand unicorns globally, and more than $4 trillion in private valuation. Yet the private market has almost no infrastructure, running on lawyers, PDFs, Excel sheets, and databases, with lawyers as the expensive glue. This is the opportunity, since private shares are restricted with transfer rules, ownership structures are complex and layered with SPVs, privacy is table stakes, and intermediaries are all offchain. Fairmint's seven years taught them that issuing equity tokens on chain is useless if the source of truth stays offchain, so the solution is putting the cap table itself on chain. The Open Cap Table Protocol turns cap tables into programmable smart contracts, and Fairmint became one of the first SEC registered transfer agents in 2023 to support it. Crucially it is not a new standard but an onchain extension of the existing Open Cap Table Format from the coalition of top securities law firms, making it compatible with the industry from day one while delivering self custody, programmability, instant settlement, automated compliance, borderless markets, traceability, and composability as regulated DeFi. Over $1.5 billion of equity is already on chain, and he frames the endgame as making IPOs great by letting everyone trade directly on the cap table, enabling new use cases like companies keeping direct connection with shareholders or trading equity directly on their own websites. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 The World Changed a Year Ago 00:46 Wall Street Rushing to Tokenize Everything 01:16 Was 16 Years of Crypto Co-Opted? 01:44 Why Wall Street Only Tokenizes Public Equity 02:15 Why the DTCC Infrastructure Works 02:41 The Low Hanging Fruit of Selling Offshore 02:56 Why We Need a Better, Simpler Infrastructure 03:16 The Private Market Is Exploding 03:44 Over $4 Trillion in Private Valuation 04:13 The Broken Infrastructure of Private Markets 04:42 Why Private Shares Are Harder Than Public 05:16 Why Issuing Tokens Alone Created More Complexity 05:33 Putting the Cap Table On Chain 06:06 The Open Cap Table Protocol 06:40 Not a New Standard: Building on the Existing Format 07:05 The Open Cap Table Coalition of Law Firms 07:38 Compatible With the Industry From Day One 08:04 Why It Is Regulated DeFi 08:29 Over $1.5 Billion of Equity On Chain 08:50 The Endgame: Making IPOs Great 09:33 Simplifying Trading Directly on the Cap Table 09:56 The Airbnb Shareholder Connection Anecdote 10:48 Trading on Brokerage or Directly on Your Website 11:12 How to Join and Build on the Protocol 11:31 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Scott Dykstra from Space and Time explains how his team is building the data layer for Ethereum's institutional era, providing data to smart contracts from institutional portfolios offchain or secured events onchain. Space and Time is a decentralized onchain database that lets smart contracts ask complex questions. When they started in late 2021, they set out to build the first verifiable ZKP-proven SQL database, using zero knowledge cryptographic proofs for queries asked by smart contracts. The original insight was that a lending smart contract knows nothing about the borrower wallet transacting with it (DeFi protocols have no database to query and aggregate past activity), so Space and Time brings an onchain database that lets contracts roll up and aggregate the history of wallet transactions and events, proven back to the contract by the next block. He frames this as the next step beyond the price-feed oracles that enabled DeFi summer in 2020: letting a smart contract actually run a SQL query aggregation, a powerful primitive for institutions entering lending and vaults. Scott describes the technology as a blockchain sitting next to the EVM that lets you create tables, insert data, and run SQL queries, paying a few SXT tokens per action (for example, creating a T-bill volumes table and querying it from a contract to mint stablecoins backed by offchain T-bills). With the Clarity Act about to pass, he sees fintechs like Stripe, PayPal, and Circle having shown banks how to mint stablecoins backed by reserves, and now major banks hiring contractors to tokenize offchain securities. The real unlock is programmable finance: banks can codify rules around minting, volume thresholds, and marking to market, extending beyond stablecoins to CLOs, equities, and commercial real estate repriced as often as desired. Space and Time acts as the secure conduit that reaches into locked-down offchain portfolios and ZK-proves to a contract that aggregated data (say, total collateral across 17 portfolios on two clouds) is accurate and untampered, ensuring minted stablecoins always match reserves in near real time. He extends this to virtual vaults that give lenders a data room and dashboard showing borrower collateral and deployed capital across exchanges and DEXes, then lets the vault contract itself run SQL queries to enforce thresholds and margin calls, enabling compliant, largely uncollateralized lending. He closes on DeFi itself, where querying a wallet's history of repaid loans could earn experienced borrowers better rates, powering a new wave of onchain lending. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Building the Data Layer for Ethereum 00:58 The First Verifiable ZK-Proven SQL Database 01:33 Why Smart Contracts Have No Database 01:58 A Verifiable Pipeline of Data to Smart Contracts 02:19 Beyond Price Feed Oracles 02:38 How the Technology Works 02:52 Spending SXT to Create, Insert, and Query 03:15 Why Banks Are Leaning In 03:38 From Fintechs to Major Banks 03:56 The Benefit of Programmable Finance 04:44 Codifying Business Logic On Chain 05:16 Where Traditional Securities Data Lives 05:42 The Need for a Secure Conduit 06:12 ZK Proving Data From Offchain Portfolios 06:50 Why This Is More Than an Oracle 07:13 Aggregating Across 17 Portfolios 07:52 Why It Must Be Near Real Time 08:25 Extending Beyond Stablecoins 08:52 Why SQL Is a Familiar Primitive 09:15 Why You Cannot Aggregate Without This 09:48 The Problem of No Asset Provenance 10:39 Taking It Further Into Vaults 11:17 Why Banks Need Borrower Transparency 11:42 The Opaque World of Ethereum Vaults 12:26 Introducing Virtual Vaults 12:57 Giving Lenders a View of Borrower Capital 13:39 The Investor Dashboard and Data Room 13:56 Feeding Data to the Vault Contract Itself 14:22 Codifying Margin Calls and Business Rules 14:53 An End-to-End Example 15:55 Smarter Vaults Beyond Morpho 16:30 What About DeFi Itself 17:03 Rewarding Loyal Borrowers With Better Rates 17:29 The Year Ahead for Banks and DeFi 17:48 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Azeem Khan, co-founder of Miden, cuts through the headlines to address the reality of the missing pieces for institutional adoption of crypto. Drawing on his experience as a UNICEF Crypto Fund consultant, a Forbes Crypto contributor, and a CoinDesk writer, he introduces Miden as a next-generation ZK blockchain that raised $25 million last year from a16z crypto, 1kx, and others. He frames the core problem: blockchains have been either fully public (creating dystopian financial surveillance) or fully private (making illicit activity easy), and while permissioned chains are one attempted fix, the average person cares less about decentralization than about counterparty risk. Miden aims to give privacy and compliance to individuals and institutions at once, focused on onboarding institutions. He argues institutional adoption matters because the billion users will not come from meme coins but from people with real money in financial institutions going on chain, noting the 2024 bull run was kicked off by BlackRock's ETF, yet most activity remains stuck in pilots rather than full deployment. Azeem shares insights from speaking with leaders like the head of digital assets at Invesco and Amy Oldenburg who leads digital asset strategy at Morgan Stanley, both $2.5 trillion firms, and buckets the obstacles into four categories. Technical barriers include compliant privacy, interoperability and fragmentation, settlement delays, too few custody and stablecoin providers, weak institutional risk tooling, and shallow liquidity depth (large players would move price charts). Regulatory and compliance barriers include token classification and tax uncertainty (he has not created a US onshore entity for fear the SEC could freeze accounts and block payroll), weak auditing and reporting, insurance shortages, cross-border tax complexity, and reputational risk (the New York Knicks closed off crypto after nearly signing FTX). Operational and governance barriers include counterparty risk, DAO decentralization theater run by whales, and broken token economic models where airdrops create sell pressure rather than demand. Cultural and organizational barriers include quarterly earnings pressure, talent shortages, risk-averse conservatism, and internal knowledge gaps where crypto evangelists are not the decision makers (Invesco needs 50 teams to sign off on a product). He ends optimistically on progress in privacy tech, stablecoin regulation, and institutional DeFi (which he thinks will simply become onchain finance), arguing crossing the chasm requires regulators, builders, and institutions collaborating on trust, compliance, and usability, with long-term vision over short-term hype. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 The Reality Behind the Headlines 00:29 About Azeem 01:02 What Is Miden 01:32 The Problem With Fully Public or Private Chains 01:56 Why Counterparty Risk Matters More Than Decentralization 02:18 Why Institutional Adoption Matters 02:38 Why the Billion Users Will Come From Institutions 03:02 Still in Pilots, Not Full Deployment 03:32 The Three Institutional Perspectives 03:59 Why Adoption Has Stalled 04:21 Technical Barrier: Compliant Privacy 04:42 Interoperability and Fragmentation 05:00 Settlement Delays and Inefficiency 05:21 Too Few Custody and Stablecoin Providers 05:44 The Problem of Liquidity Depth 06:02 Regulatory and Compliance Barriers 06:26 Why He Has No US Onshore Entity 06:40 Auditing, Reporting, and Insurance Shortages 07:16 Cross-Border Tax and Reputational Risk 07:44 Operations and Governance Barriers 08:02 DAO Decentralization Theater 08:36 Why Token Models Are Broken 08:57 Cultural Barriers: Quarterly Earnings Pressure 09:26 Talent Shortages and Risk-Averse Culture 10:13 Why Evangelists Are Not the Decision Makers 10:49 Why Invesco Needs 50 Teams to Sign Off 11:07 Where the Industry Is Making Progress 11:29 From DeFi to Onchain Finance 11:56 What It Takes to Cross the Chasm 12:16 Long-Term Vision Over Short-Term Hype 12:34 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hart Montgomery

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Hart Montgomery from the LFDT (Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust) explains why open source matters for institutional adoption, sharing lessons from the Linux Foundation. He covers open source background, table-stakes items institutions expect (software licensing, IP protections, and security best practices), and open governance. He pushes back on the perception, common in the blockchain community, that open source is purely a cypherpunk ideal championed by Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation. In reality open source is everywhere: even in a typical closed-source enterprise codebase, around 90% of a modern application is open source, assembled as an open source hamburger of frameworks, custom glue code, and libraries. He describes the virtuous flywheel where open source projects power commercial products whose profits flow back into the projects, amplified when a real community forms (illustrated by Kubernetes, where Google's share of contributions shrank proportionally even as its absolute contributions grew). The Linux Foundation exists to solve collaboration when multiple parties want shared code but trust no single owner, and it hosts many Ethereum projects including Besu (around 15 to 20% of mainnet). Hart walks through the table stakes. On licensing, he covers three types: BSL (source-available, not truly open source, like Arbitrum Nitro), copyleft (requires derivative works be made public, principled but commercially hard since companies fear forced disclosure), and permissive (do-what-you-want, easiest for adoption), recommending Apache 2 for its explicit patent grants and warning about dependency pitfalls like LGPL. On IP protections, he explains contributors may add code with patent restrictions, which is why the Linux Foundation created the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), and urges every project to use a DCO or CLA. On security, he highlights vulnerability disclosure, software bills of materials (SBOMs) to track dependencies (citing a Black Duck audit where 81% of codebases had high-risk or critical vulnerabilities), and artifact signing via tools like Sigstore against impersonation, plus AI contributor policies and OpenSSF resources like the scorecard for verifiability. He closes on governance, distinguishing open source (code), open development (building in the open), and open governance (transparent roles and roadmap), ranging from a code dump to open product to benevolent dictatorship to true open governance (a do-ocracy where those who do decide). He argues institutions are far more likely to adopt openly governed projects since it avoids vendor lock-in and signals long-term health. 00:00 Introduction 00:34 What the Talk Will Cover 00:58 Why Open Source Is Not Just Cypherpunk 01:30 The Open Source Hamburger 01:54 The Value of Open Source to Enterprises 02:20 The Virtuous Flywheel of Open Source 02:46 The Kubernetes Community Example 03:19 Why the Linux Foundation Exists 03:39 The Breadth of the Linux Foundation 04:38 The Ethereum Projects at the LF 05:06 Why Institutions Trust Open Source 05:27 Defining Open Source Software 05:48 The Three Types of Licenses 06:11 BSL: Source Available, Not Open Source 06:37 Copyleft Licenses and Their Caveats 07:31 Permissive Licenses and Apache 2 08:19 Common Licensing Pitfalls 09:08 Other Legal and IP Protections 09:33 The Risk of Patent Lawsuits 09:58 The Developer Certificate of Origin 10:50 Moving On to Security 11:10 The Open Source Security Foundation 11:40 Making Bug Reporting Easy 12:32 The Software Supply Chain Problem 12:53 Why 81% of Codebases Have Vulnerabilities 13:30 Software Bills of Materials 13:58 Minimizing Dependencies 14:17 Signing and Authenticating Artifacts 14:37 AI and Security 15:34 Why Verifiability Matters 15:57 Talking About Governance 16:27 Open Source vs Development vs Governance 17:12 Four Categories of Governance 17:44 From Benevolent Dictatorship to Open Governance 18:32 Why Open Governance Wins Adoption 19:15 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this ETHConf Crypto Startup Showdown, hosted by Kartik of ETHGlobal, 14 startups (drawn from past ETHGlobal hackathon projects turning into companies plus open applications) each pitch for three minutes followed by a four-minute Q&A, competing for a $5,000 cash prize for the best pitch plus future ETHGlobal, Pragma, and ETHConf sponsorship opportunities and Cointelegraph service credits. Three early-stage VC judges give feedback and guidance: Tarun Chitra, Joyce Yang of Pivot Global, and David Shengart of the Cointelegraph accelerator. The lineup spans DeFi automation, agent infrastructure, RWAs, stablecoins, privacy, payments, gaming, and prediction markets. The teams pitch as follows. Amplifi builds single-click permissionless prime brokerage, using trusted execution environments and programmable custody to let traders borrow against any DeFi position across venues. Glider automates any investment strategy, letting users build direct-indexed onchain portfolios (like a Nancy Pelosi tracker or biotech basket) with no gas, signing, or bridging, reporting over 100,000 users. Zyfai embeds personal yield agents into wallets that monitor and rebalance funds, having handled $2.4 billion across 10,000 wallets. ascii presents Box, a cheap, powerful sandbox giving AI agents their own computers at up to 25x less cost. Papre is the agreement layer bridging legal meaning and smart contract execution, automating milestones, escrow, and arbitration. ASCNT brings market-making yield to LPs by pricing toxic versus healthy swap flow and auctioning arbitrage back to the pool. Cambria is a crypto game studio building onchain PvP duels and MMO experiences. Frankencoin offers the largest Swiss Franc stablecoin and its Frankencoin Pool Share governance token, pitching CHF as a superior store of value via an oracle-free CDP. YieldSeeker grows wealth on autopilot with conversational DeFi agents managing $1.5 million. Radius brings the institutional repo market onchain with peer-to-peer funding that bypasses dealer banks. Unlink provides privacy and compliance infrastructure letting companies use any chain privately in three lines of code via zero knowledge. dolphinze builds contractor-first payment infrastructure with one wire in and compliant multi-currency payouts out. Frames offers one composite model giving AI agents access to the paywalled internet across 4,000+ tools with unified billing. PulsePlay is the settlement layer for second-by-second markets using state channels, launching live in-play World Cup predictions with no ghost fills. The judges deliberate to pick the winning pitch. 00:00 Introduction 00:29 How the Showdown Works 00:54 Meet the Three Judges 01:30 The Prize and Sponsorship Opportunities 02:11 The 14 Teams 02:35 Amplifi: Permissionless Prime Brokerage 05:56 Amplifi Q&A 10:35 Glider: Automate Any Investment Strategy 14:28 Glider Q&A 18:42 Zyfai: Personal Yield Agents 22:11 Zyfai Q&A 26:22 ascii: Box, a Sandbox for Agents 30:39 ascii Q&A 34:15 Papre: The Agreement Layer 37:20 Papre Q&A 43:17 ASCNT: Market Making Yield for LPs 46:39 ASCNT Q&A 50:12 Cambria: Crypto Game Studio 53:14 Cambria Q&A 57:41 Frankencoin: Swiss Franc Stablecoin 1:00:16 Frankencoin Q&A 1:05:19 YieldSeeker: Wealth on Autopilot 1:08:19 YieldSeeker Q&A 1:13:34 Radius: Onchain Repo Platform 1:16:33 Radius Q&A 1:20:34 Unlink: Privacy and Compliance Infrastructure 1:23:55 Unlink Q&A 1:28:45 dolphinze: Payment Infrastructure for Work 1:31:54 dolphinze Q&A 1:36:45 Frames: Paywalled Data for AI Agents 1:39:24 Frames Q&A 1:43:59 PulsePlay: Settlement Layer for Fast Markets 1:47:17 PulsePlay Q&A 1:51:45 Closing and Judge Deliberation _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jan Gorzny

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Jan Gorzny from Zircuit discusses how to bring institutional adoption from Wall Street onto Ethereum, focusing not on ZK but on the barriers institutions and their users face and how crypto-native solutions can overcome them. He motivates the case by cataloging the pain points of TradFi: it is good but not great, with poor settlement efficiency, a lack of transparency (you rarely know who you are dealing with at a bank), and costs and difficulty that scale as you become the institution itself, since it is an old industry not optimized for the last 20 to 30 years of technology, with heavily siloed money. On chain solves much of this: fast and improving settlement, 24/7 trading regardless of bank hours, strong transparency (a double-edged sword given weak default privacy), programmable money enabling automated trading and looping, and composability across asset classes. He argues the value proposition is real, and while early banking-the-unbanked adoption was slow, RWAs and stablecoins have blown up, with FX and other services now being piloted on chain. Jan walks through the barriers. First, regulatory uncertainty: unclear asset classifications, cross-border complications, and technical risks like recurring smart contract exploits (worsened by a bad first quarter) where you cannot simply patch decentralized code, so institutions avoid it not from misunderstanding but because their lawyers will not sign off. Second, infrastructure and chain fragmentation, with around 131 rollups as of last October creating hard choices about which chain, oracle, and bridge to use and forcing new, modular, redundant DApp designs rather than the cookie-cutter patterns of 2022. Third, permissionlessness as a genuine trade-off, where censorship resistance and transparency clash with the whitelisting and controls institutions need. He surveys emerging solutions: permissioned DeFi with KYC and whitelisting, RWA token standards like ERC-3643 and ERC-1400, ZK-based KYC that validates a passport without revealing it, customizable L2s, and safer bridge standards like OFTs and CCIP. He advises builders to design for modularity, understand their trust model, and engage regulators early, and notes users now face far more complex due diligence and unpredictable yield, arguing uncertainty is risk. He closes on his preference for predictable DeFi and Zircuit's product targeting 8 to 11% yield on USDC and USDT with no management fees or minimums, built to work with Wall Street and institutional partners. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 The Barriers Wall Street Faces On Chain 00:52 The Pain Points of Traditional Finance 01:20 Why Costs Scale for Institutions 01:45 Why Money Is So Siloed 02:13 How On Chain Solves These Problems 02:34 Transparency and Programmable Money 03:11 Why the Value Proposition Is Real 03:32 From Banking the Unbanked to Real Adoption 03:44 How RWAs and Stablecoins Blew Up 04:06 Piloting Other TradFi Services On Chain 04:38 Why We Have Only Scratched the Surface 04:56 Why Builders Must Start Agile 05:14 The First Barrier: Regulatory Uncertainty 05:40 Unclear Classifications and Cross-Border Issues 06:02 Why You Cannot Just Fix Exploited Code 06:26 Why Lawyers Will Not Sign Off 06:50 The Second Barrier: Infrastructure and Fragmentation 07:22 Choosing Among 131 Rollups 07:41 Standards, Oracles, and Bridges 08:07 Why the Cookie-Cutter DApp Era Is Over 08:28 Why New DApps Need Redundancy 09:08 The Third Barrier: Permissionlessness 09:30 Choosing Which Permissionlessness Matters 09:59 Emerging Solutions: Permissioned DeFi 10:13 RWA Token Standards Like ERC-3643 and 1400 10:28 ZK-Based KYC With a Passport Scan 10:44 Building Your Own Customizable L2 10:59 How Bridges Have Come a Long Way 11:17 Tokens Built With Legal Barriers in Mind 11:37 What This Means for Builders 11:56 What This Means for Users 12:28 Why Uncertainty Is Risk 12:47 The Case for Predictable DeFi 12:59 Zircuit's Product for Wall Street 13:13 Targeting 8 to 11% Yield With No Fees 13:54 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _