ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

With Marc Zeller (ACI) and Token Brice (Polaris / Pharos). In this fireside chat, Marc Zeller, joining remotely from Tokyo, and TokenBrice reflect on how DeFi has changed since about 2018. After the Aave governance disputes, they ask who owns a protocol's intellectual property, what a token holder actually owns, and why the market now rewards tokens with a claim on revenue and punishes combined equity and token structures. Zeller says his new lending protocol, ACI, will be token only, with its IP in a foundation and revenue controlled by holders, while TokenBrice describes how Polaris issues new tokens only when users burn the collateral token behind its stablecoin. Both criticise DeFi for giving up privacy to court institutions, which Zeller says hold only about $4 billion of Morpho's $12 billion. Fireside Chat at ETHSofia 2026, 24 September 2026, Sofia Tech Park, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speakers ▸ Marc Zeller, Co-founder, ACI Marc Zeller is co-founder of ACI, a new DeFi lending product launching this year. He co-founded Ethereum France and helped organise the first EthCC in Paris in 2015, then went on to roles at Consensys and Coinhouse, the first French-regulated CASP. In 2019 he joined EthLend to prepare the launch of Aave V1, and in 2022 founded the Aave Chan Initiative, which drove strategy and growth for the Aave DAO for more than three years. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marczelleraci X: https://x.com/Marczeller ▸ Token Brice, Founder, Polaris / Pharos Liquidity engineer, protocol analyst, and co-founder of The DeFi Collective. TokenBrice has been building in Ethereum DeFi since the early days and now leads Polaris, tackling stablecoin centralisation head-on. X: https://x.com/tokenbrice Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:18 Setting the scene: two DeFi veterans 02:00 Governance after the death of DAOs 04:37 What does a token holder actually own? 06:26 Equity or token: you cannot play both games 08:29 Marc's next project: token only, no equity 10:46 Polaris: a new token emission mechanism 12:56 Why now: crossing over to the builder side 17:11 Did the institutions deliver? 20:35 Losing the war on privacy 23:13 Audience comment and close 25:01 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

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 Lisbon 2026, Gathin T, a senior developer at 0G, introduces 0G as a permissionless blockchain for AI agents, covering what it is, how to start building, and the resources available. He frames the core value up front: 0G enables verifiable, private inferencing where model queries run inside a trusted execution environment (TEE) so the input and output are verified and not exposed to centralized entities. He then walks through the problems with centralized AI. Recent restrictions and re-enablements around Fable Fi show how access can be throttled, gated, or removed by government or corporate decisions. Subscription pricing can change unpredictably (he cites region-specific pricing). Censorship can refuse legitimate requests (like cybersecurity research) based on a model's parameters. He breaks these into specific issues: opacity and lack of trust (you cannot verify you are getting the actual model behind a black box), vendor lock-in with closed APIs and shifting policies, and no true ownership of the agents you create. Gathin explains how 0G addresses each. Inference is provable with references, running in a tamper-proof input-output channel where your data is not used for training. Rather than lock-in, 0G is a marketplace where you can switch between multiple providers for the same model, choosing cheaper or lower-latency options by region. Ownership comes via agentic IDs (the ERC-7857 standard), NFTs tied to an agent that can be transferred. He stresses the platform is permissionless with no gatekeeper, and that its modular stack lets you swap any layer without rebuilding, with incentives for compute providers and future fine-tuning contributors. He notes open source models like Kimi K2, GLM, and DeepSeek are reaching parity, and covers the architecture: an infinitely scalable chain (11,000 TPS, sub-second finality), decentralized storage (80 to 90% cheaper than AWS S3), compute, a soon-launching fine-tuning and RAG layer, a provider marketplace, and alignment nodes (around 92,000 sold) giving the community governance. He highlights products like the private compute router at pc.0g.ai (OpenAI-compatible keys) and the 0G app for building, notes 0G is well funded ($325 million) with 400+ ecosystem partners, and closes with the $15,000 in bounties across best AI product, infrastructure, and continuity tracks, plus a Telegram group for testnet tokens, followed by Q&A. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Welcome to Lisbon 00:44 What This Workshop Covers 01:04 The Core Problem With Centralized AI 01:25 Verifiable, Private Inference in a TEE 01:49 How Centralized Models Get Restricted 02:07 Unpredictable Subscription Pricing 02:45 The Censorship Problem 03:04 Opacity and the Black Box Problem 03:45 How 0G Enables Verifiable Inference 04:13 Vendor Lock-In and Switching Providers 04:58 The Problem of No Agent Ownership 05:17 Agentic IDs as Ownership 05:37 Centralized Control and Censorship 06:18 Swapping Layers Without Rebuilding 07:01 Incentives Across the Modular Stack 07:38 Why Open Source Models Are Catching Up 08:01 Private TLS Routing and Attestation 08:58 The Modular Architecture 09:18 Decentralized Storage for Agents and Models 09:56 The Marketplace and Alignment Layer 10:25 Why Trust Is the Biggest Issue 10:53 0G Compute and GLM 11:16 Storage 80 to 90% Cheaper Than S3 11:38 Chain Throughput and Sunsetting the DA 12:00 Agentic ID and the ERC-7857 Standard 12:12 The Private Compute Router 12:42 The 0G App and Agent Launchpad 13:02 Funding, Partners, and Grants 13:26 The $15,000 in Bounty Tracks 13:47 The Infrastructure Track 14:07 The Continuity Track 14:25 Joining the Telegram for Testnet Tokens 15:02 Q&A: Track Ideas and Requirements 15:57 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ansgar Dietrichs

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Ansgar Dietrichs from the Ethereum Foundation, who has been in Ethereum core research for seven years, currently leads scaling work and co-leads the Okodas governance process, shares personal reflections on Ethereum's role in what he calls the decade of adoption. He frames the first 10 years of blockchains (2014 to 2024) as the infrastructure era requiring countless zero to ones across wallets, transaction supply chains, and the entire tech stack. He argues 2024 marked the ChatGPT equivalent moment for crypto, but unlike AI's single inflection point, it was a perfect storm of the tech stack reaching maturity, the US regulatory environment shifting from open hostility to a friendly stance, and stablecoins finally hitting product market fit beyond crypto native use cases. Ansgar contrasts two possible futures for crypto. The bad outcome is a fragmented world of independent chains (general purpose, app chains, privacy chains, permissioned chains) all linked by brittle custom bridges that have repeatedly failed and require each user to reason about every chain's security model independently. Ethereum's answer is a singular foundational framework that embraces all that customization but routes everything back to a shared settlement layer, enabling trustless interoperability between any pair of chains or assets, propagated security guarantees from Ethereum L1, full customizability at each layer, a single entry point for users, and ETH as the one native asset across the onchain economy. He explains the EF's pivot toward being one node among many ecosystem stewards rather than the center of Ethereum, then defends Ethereum's values as deeply practical rather than overly ideological. He cites security through redundancy across 10+ Ethereum clients being especially crucial during the coming AI driven cyber security arms race, Ethereum's principled postquantum planning while other chains scramble, and neutrality and strategic reliability under what he calls the Amazon test: would a big tech company comfortable trust putting its business flows on Ethereum knowing it could never be rugged. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Ansgar's Background at the Ethereum Foundation 00:52 Why ETHCom Is Emblematic of a New Time Period 01:16 The First Decade of Blockchains: 2014 to 2024 02:11 The ChatGPT Moment for Crypto 02:41 Three Forces: Tech, Regulation, and Stablecoins 03:24 Entering the Decade of Adoption 03:48 The Bad Outcome: A Fragmented Future 04:51 Why Brittle Bridges Are the Bigger Problem 05:41 Ethereum's Answer: A Singular Foundational Framework 06:18 Why a Shared Settlement Layer Wins 06:47 Trustless Interoperability Across All Chains 07:35 Aspirational Today, Priority for Adoption Era 07:57 Propagating Ethereum's Security Guarantees 08:31 Full Customizability with Ethereum as Entry Point 09:12 ETH as the Native Asset of the Onchain Economy 09:43 The EF as One Node Among Many Stewards 10:48 Embracing the Ethereum Way of Decentralization 11:52 Why Ethereum's Values Are Misunderstood 12:11 Why Principled Equals Practical 12:34 Security: 10 Clients and 100% Uptime 13:03 The Coming AI Cybersecurity Arms Race 13:52 Quantum Resistance and the Beam Chain 14:54 Neutrality and Credible Neutrality 15:23 Why Censorship Resistance Matters for Institutions 16:31 Strategic Reliability and the Amazon Test 17:58 Useful Across the Spectrum 18:29 The Four Step Plan for Ethereum 19:51 Closing: Ethereum's Best Time Is Yet to Come _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *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, Jill Malandrino moderates a discussion with Declan Fox and Rob Dawson from Consensys on the role of neutral governance in institutional blockchain adoption. They argue that while open source software has been foundational for technology companies, it is not sufficient on its own for enterprises making decade long bets, since the technology could be swept from under their feet without credible neutral stewardship. Declan compares open source without neutral governance to a building where you can peek in the door and inspect the code, but the house could still be demolished. The conversation positions governance not as ideology but as a practical procurement decision. Declan and Rob detail Besu's success as the institutional Ethereum client, running 15% of Ethereum mainnet but 80 to 90% of all blocks on enterprise blockchains, largely because of its Apache 2 license and Hyperledger and LFDT hosting. They explain that Consensys has now made the same bet on Layer 2 by contributing Linea technology to the Linux Foundation. The discussion covers tradeoffs in the EF's CROPS mandate (censorship resistant, open source, private, secure), how zero knowledge proofs enable confidential blockchains to interoperate without revealing sensitive information, the risk of digitizing fragmentation across chains, and atomic cross chain delivery versus payment as a recently unlocked use case. They close on the holy trinity of decentralized trust (blockchains), decentralized identity, and decentralized AI, with discussion of how ERC-7804 helps manage non human identities in a future of machine to machine blockchain interaction. 00:00 Introduction 00:29 Why Governance Is Becoming Central to Institutional Adoption 00:52 Open Source Is Not Enough: The Building Analogy 01:51 Why Technologists Should Care About Governance 02:37 Besu's Adoption Through Apache 2 and Linux Foundation 03:15 Besu as the Institutional Ethereum Client 03:41 Donating Linea Technology to the Linux Foundation 04:26 The Linux Foundation as a Trusted Brand 04:47 Does Governance Quality Match Technical Quality 05:40 Competitors Coming Together for Shared Standards 07:07 Governance as a Component of Scalability 07:26 Challenges and Friction Points in Governance 08:35 Maintaining Innovation Velocity Under Stewardship 09:55 Governance Improves Product Practices 10:00 The CROPS Mandate and Its Tradeoffs 11:40 Privacy and Security as Institutional Adoption Blockers 11:58 How Privacy Is Achieved Technically with ZK Proofs 12:50 Avoiding Digitized Fragmentation Across Chains 13:58 LFDT as a Forum for Interop Standards 14:16 No One Size Fits All Chain Solution 14:51 Interoperability as the Remaining Pillar 16:04 Cross Chain Delivery Versus Payment Now Possible 16:35 Security as a Critical Conversation 17:36 Challenges with Legacy Enterprise Blockchain Infrastructure 19:08 Ethereum's 10+ Years of Continuous Uptime 19:52 What's Next: Progressive Decentralization 21:16 Integration, Not Us Versus Them 22:22 How Rough Consensus Works in Practice 23:30 Selectivity in Onboarding Projects to Foundations 24:48 The Maturation of Governance, Security, and Privacy 25:25 Closing Thoughts on Institutional Adoption 25:44 The Holy Trinity: Decentralized Trust, Identity, and AI 26:26 Governing Non Human Identities and AI Agents 27:21 ERC-7804 and Machine to Machine Infrastructure 27:37 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, 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 fireside chat, Aryan Sheikhalian from CMT Digital sits down with Tom Zschach, who recently finished over six years as Chief Innovation Officer at SWIFT, to discuss settlement, trust, tokenization, and neutral governance. Aryan opens on crypto's pitch that it is faster and cheaper, and asks whether speed was ever what held institutions back. Tom explains that while speed and cost matter, the institutional space above all needs certainty: a treasurer sending millions or billions wants security and recourse, and will accept a transaction taking a few seconds longer if the outcome is guaranteed. He addresses what crypto misunderstands about SWIFT, clarifying that SWIFT is a messaging and coordination network that does not issue value, settle, or custody. It coordinates trust through standards, a rule book, and bilateral agreements, and he calls it the original DAO with human governance. Tom explains the SWIFT ledger, a blockchain layered on top of the existing network with no mandates, whose first use case is banks making cross border payments between themselves using deposit tokens as an alternative to nostro vostra accounts. On trust, he frames the hard problem as a boundary issue: blockchains work well for things fully inside the network like swaps and staking, but get complicated when relying on external data or representing off-chain assets like stablecoin reserves. He predicts the most liquid, well understood markets like tokenized bonds and treasuries (DTCC targeting up to $100 trillion) will be tokenized first, while dispute prone assets like real estate come later. He warns against replicating incumbency and single chain control in Web3, favoring a multi-chain world with real competition even as Ethereum sits in pole position. Drawing on his time at CLS (which settles around $10 trillion daily across 18 currencies), he argues scaling institutional adoption requires regulatory clarity and credentials like KYC and wallet eligibility traveling with the asset across chains. He closes bullish that cross border value will move on public blockchains, citing Citi's $5.5 trillion projection. 00:00 Introduction 00:28 Meet CMT Digital and Tom Zschach 01:08 Was Speed Ever What Held Institutions Back 01:28 Why Institutions Need Certainty Above All 02:22 What the Crypto Crowd Misunderstands About SWIFT 03:06 SWIFT as a Messaging Network 03:26 What SWIFT Is Not: No Value, Settlement, or Custody 03:49 Adding Density and Endpoints With the SWIFT Ledger 04:05 SWIFT as a Coordination Network for Trust 04:41 What Blockchains Need to Replicate SWIFT 05:03 Why SWIFT and Blockchains Do Different Things 05:30 SWIFT as the Original DAO 05:56 How the SWIFT Ledger Works 06:25 Cross Border Payments With Deposit Tokens 06:51 What Trust Means Across TradFi and Crypto 07:33 Why External Dependencies Are the Hard Part 08:11 Stablecoins and the Boundary Issue 08:32 What Gets Tokenized First 09:02 Why Demand for Digital Money Is Clear 09:20 Liquid Markets: Bonds and Treasuries First 10:02 Why Dispute Prone Assets Come Later 10:45 SWIFT as the First DAO Revisited 11:22 Incumbency on Blockchain Rails 11:43 Why a Single Chain Undermines Neutrality 12:14 Why a Multi-Chain World Is Better 12:49 Room for More Open Governance 13:10 Leveling the Playing Field With DeFi 13:39 Tokenization Primitives Like Transferable KYC 14:31 Why He Calls It Finance, Not TradFi 14:49 Tokenization Transforming Capital Formation 15:18 Why Transformation Takes Time 15:45 What Convinced Him From Inside the Incumbent 16:07 CLS and $10 Trillion Daily FX Settlement 16:32 Why FX Settlement Was an Early Blockchain Use Case 17:25 Getting Banks Hooked Into Digital Assets 17:47 The Missing Pieces for Institutional Scale 18:21 Why Scale Breaks Across Venue and Chain 18:51 Why Credentials Must Travel With the Asset 19:12 ZK and Solving 19:35 Five Years Out: Value on Public Blockchains 20:09 Citi's $5.5 Trillion Projection 20:42 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Christine Kim

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Christine Kim from Protocol Watch shares the framework she has used for 8 years tracking Ethereum development and governance, including years running the ACD Toolkit and covering Ethereum's All Core Devs calls. She was one of the first people to regularly cover ACD calls, now runs an independent Ethereum development newsletter and a Bitcoin development newsletter, hosts a podcast on both, and operates a research and advisory firm helping businesses building on the two chains. She frames her insider approach around three foundational questions: how does Ethereum governance work, who are the key players, and where and when do they meet to make decisions. Christine explains that Ethereum governance is like an onion. The outer formal layer is defined by EIPs like EIP-1 (defining the EIP process) and EIP-7723 (labels for CFI, PFI, SFI, DFI status), which AI can help summarize. The harder and more important part is the informal layer, the unwritten norms driving decisions. She notes that on ACD calls each client team gets an equal vote regardless of whether they have 40% or 1% market share, and that contentious decisions require supermajorities whose thresholds shift with the level of contention. She emphasizes that governance itself evolves rapidly, pointing to the new headliner process introduced only in the Fusaka upgrade. On the "who" question, she pushes past treating stakeholders categorically (validators, developers, users, client teams) to look at who individuals actually work for and how their companies are funded. Most Ethereum client teams were seeded and funded by the Ethereum Foundation, which explains its historical leadership, and as the EF narrows focus the funding sources for client diversity are opening up. On the "where," she highlights the three ACD calls as the most important decision-making forum, noting the cadence has evolved from once every two weeks pre-merge to twice weekly today as developers push toward two upgrades a year. Christine explains she deprecated the ACD and BTC toolkits earlier this year not because the framework was wrong, but because static written posts were suboptimal and her readers mostly wanted actionable insights rather than the underlying research process. She closes by challenging the room to apply her framework to at least one protocol, arguing it reveals whether a protocol is genuinely decentralized or engaging in "decentralization theater" with multisigs and federations, and helps identify the real values (transparency, verifiability, accountability) driving each blockchain's differentiation. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Christine's Track Record 01:12 Launching the ACD and BTC Toolkits 01:36 The Three Questions Framework 02:15 Ethereum Governance as an Onion 02:41 The Formal Layer: EIPs and Labels 04:07 The Informal Layer: Unwritten Norms 04:29 How Client Team Votes Actually Work 05:26 Supermajorities for Contentious Decisions 06:17 How Governance Itself Evolves 06:43 The Headliner Process in Fusaka 07:38 Beyond Categorical Stakeholders 08:34 Looking Deeper at Who Funds Client Teams 09:19 Why the Ethereum Foundation Seeded Client Diversity 09:47 What Happens as the EF Narrows Focus 10:40 Being in the Room Where Decisions Happen 11:34 The Three ACD Calls 11:54 How the Cadence Has Evolved Over Time 12:48 Twice Weekly Coordination Today 13:11 Breakout Calls for Long Term Roadmap 13:38 Why ACD Calls Are More Accurate Than X 14:22 The People, Places, and Process 14:46 Applying the Framework to Bitcoin 15:16 Why Christine Deprecated the Toolkits 15:39 The Medium Was Suboptimal 16:09 Readers Wanted Actionable Insights 17:34 A Call to Apply the Framework 18:14 Questioning the True Value of Protocols 19:05 Decentralization Theater 19:54 What Are the Real Ends of Decentralization 21:01 Closing and Resources _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *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, Ashton Keys introduces Society Protocol, which he frames as the evolution of blockchain systems to fulfill an entire state structure on chain through a paradigm he calls synchronized states, the future of human coordination. He argues coordination is humanity's superpower, since we are the only species that coordinates at planetary scale, and that improving it even fractionally benefits society more than any individual achievement. Coordination is not natural, so humanity developed systems like democracy, currencies, and governance to coordinate despite competing interests. The premier system of recent centuries has been the nation state, built on the double entry accounting age and its duplicated, fragmented contracts stored separately between counterparties. This gave us equality, democracy, and capitalism, but when technology is added, it drives centralization into gatekeepers. Ashton identifies eight pillars of a state structure beyond government (identity, monetary systems, societal state, time synchronization, shared reality of events, group decision making, the social contract, and value systems), noting all currently centralize into powerful gatekeepers who warp shared reality. He argues the 2,000 year double entry accounting age is ending, and that the transition began in 2009 with Bitcoin decentralizing money and 2015 with Ethereum decentralizing assets. But blockchains lack identity and Sybil resistance, so they cannot form people, governance, or all eight pillars, and their uneven social layer forces them into immutable pyramid structures. He reframes blockchains as two-dimensional clocks and synchronized state machines, and proposes evolving to four-dimensional synchronized state machines that unlock a triple entry accounting age. Society Protocol is a four-dimensional model world synchronizing identities, property, governance, and interactions together, unlocking Sybil resistance, identity, and direct programmable governance where changes update the whole social contract instantly. He walks through the eight pillars as programmable components, warns that centralized CBDCs are a competing path leading to a technofeudal dark age, and closes framing Society Protocol not as revolution but evolution built on Ethereum bridging web3 to web4, seeking committed builders ahead of a public fundraise in about six months. 00:00 Introduction 00:38 Coordination as Humanity's Superpower 01:12 Why Coordination Beats Individual Ability 01:33 How Humans Coordinate Through Systems 01:56 The Nation State as the Premier System 02:20 The Double Entry Accounting Age 02:50 How Duplicated Contracts Work 03:09 What the Nation State Gave Us 03:25 Why Technology Causes Centralization 03:38 The Eight Pillars of a State Structure 04:04 Why We Don't Control Our Own Identities 04:20 How Gatekeepers Grow Powerful 04:56 How Media Platforms Warp Shared Reality 05:44 The Stacked Problems of Centralization 06:09 Why It Looks Like the Apocalypse 06:30 The End of the Double Entry Accounting Age 06:59 From Bitcoin to Ethereum 07:23 Why Blockchains Lack Identity 07:42 Why Blockchains Get Forced Into Pyramids 08:07 Blockchains as Two-Dimensional Clocks 09:08 From Static Objects to Synchronized States 09:30 What Is Society Protocol 10:00 Unlocking Identity and Governance 10:44 Unifying All Eight Pillars Into One Machine 11:30 Pillar One: The Timeline 11:51 Pillars: State Sphere, Actors, and Money 12:09 Events and the Model World 12:30 Governance That Updates Society Instantly 13:00 The Social Contract and Protocol Effects 13:17 Value Functions and What Society Values 14:23 What It All Means for Global Coordination 15:42 Why Synchronized States Beat Nation States 16:26 A Modular System Like a Linux Foundation 16:49 Why CBDCs Are a Competing Path 17:38 The Risk of a Technofeudal Dark Age 18:01 Evolution, Not Revolution 19:10 A Call for Builders and True Believers 20:01 Building on Ethereum From Web3 to Web4 20:40 The Path to a Public Fundraise 20:59 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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 talk, Clare Adelgren, global blockchain leader at EY, explores the institutional path from pilot to production onchain, arguing the title captures exactly where the market sits today and why she is optimistic. She opens with a historical analogy: at the dawn of railroads people fixated on the trains (speed, cargo, destinations), but the bigger story turned out to be the rail network and how that infrastructure reshaped entire economies. Similarly, the car alone did not create modern transport; that took roads, safety standards, and institutions around the rules. She draws the parallel to blockchain, where for years attention centered on cryptocurrencies and tokenomics as the first vehicles on the rails, but the biggest shift now is toward the rails themselves, the infrastructure for moving assets, settling value, and coordinating trust in a programmable way, plus the rules and standards needed to operate at scale. Clare contrasts earlier institutional conversations (framed as experimentation, pilots, proofs of concept, consortia, and controlled off-chain or hybrid models that let institutions explore without full commitment) with 2026, where outlooks from the World Economic Forum onward describe a broad shift from experiment to enterprise-grade deployment, with major banks shipping products, regulators drawing clearer lines, and a growing pipeline of real world assets queued for issuance and servicing. The question has shifted from whether the technology works to whether institutions can operationalize it at scale in a trusted, governable, compliant, and valuable way. She argues this moment feels different not just because of regulation reducing uncertainty, but because technology maturity, workable economics, improving privacy, and serious interoperability are aligning at once. Framing technology as table stakes and institutional readiness as the real unlock, she says the next wave will be defined by industrialization rather than innovation, embedding blockchain into real operating models. She lays out five pillars of production readiness: trust and governance (accountability and aligned participants), compliance and controls (auditability, risk management, regulatory scrutiny), interoperability with legacy systems, privacy and confidentiality (selective disclosure and privacy on public blockchains, a major EY investment), and measurable business value rather than innovation theater. She closes that the next phase belongs to institutions that move from curiosity to capability and from experiments to execution. 00:00 Introduction 00:46 Why Clare Is Optimistic About the Path 01:00 The Railroad Analogy 01:32 Why the Car Alone Did Not Create Transport 02:18 Parallels to Blockchain Today 02:45 The Shift Toward the Rails Themselves 03:13 How Institutional Conversations Used to Look 03:51 Why That Caution Made Sense 04:38 How the Conversation Changed by 2026 05:18 Banks, Regulators, and the RWA Pipeline 05:51 The Question Has Shifted From Can It Work 06:25 Why This Moment Feels Different 07:01 Why Regulation Is Not the Whole Story 07:22 How Maturity, Economics, and Interoperability Align 08:01 EY's Long-Held View on Scale Adoption 08:39 Why Technology Is Only Table Stakes 09:27 From Technical Feasibility to Institutional Operability 10:03 Why the Next Wave Is Industrialization 10:30 What Production Readiness Really Means 11:01 Pillar One: Trust and Governance 11:26 Pillar Two: Compliance and Controls 11:57 Pillar Three: Interoperability With Legacy Systems 12:25 Pillar Four: Privacy and Confidentiality 13:08 Pillar Five: Measurable Business Value 14:03 Institutional-Grade Onchain Infrastructure 14:32 What It Means for Institutional Leaders 15:05 Why This Is an Execution Phase 15:31 Why Operationalizing Beats Talking About Innovation 15:57 Why This Is Just the Beginning 16:35 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, Jill Malandrino sits down with Andrew McCormick on his third day in a newly created head of institutional adoption role at Chainlink Labs, after nearly two decades inside trading and capital markets, most recently running a NASDAQ listed US brokerage. Andrew, who has been with Ethereum since 2015 (introduced by his dad and his enthusiasm for YouTube videos on it), explains why he left the operator seat at firms like eToro, E*Trade, and Morgan Stanley to build infrastructure now. Inspired partly by his four kids and the Mario Brothers plumbing theme, he says that after 15 years helping people navigate the plumbing of finance, he wants to build and fix it himself, and chose Chainlink Labs because it is the connective infrastructure between traditional finance and blockchain, working with firms like DTCC, UBS, and SWIFT. Andrew explains where onchain makes the most obvious difference: not just efficiency and speed, but freedom, through faster settlement. He shares a personal aha moment when moving houses from DC to New York, where a simple wire took four days, many calls, and a $35 fee, illustrating that money still doesn't move as well as it should. He walks through the settlement evolution from T+3 to T+1 to the dream of T+0, where tokenized assets moving near instantaneously via Chainlink verification reduce risk and collateral requirements while getting users their money faster. He describes his three-part role: helping firms already building (UBS, SWIFT, DTCC, JP Morgan) go deeper, educating institutions ready to start, and educating financial analysts and research writers, drawing on his lifelong passion for teaching. He identifies three blockers to tokenization: regulatory clarity (where the Clarity Act would help enormously), trust and confidence (built each time a firm like DTCC or SWIFT launches with Chainlink), and education. On the Clarity Act, he contrasts today's reliance on 1930s laws, a 1946 Supreme Court orange-grove case, and 50 differing states with a statute purpose-built for the use case. He points to signals of genuine institutional adoption (banks moving on chain, the wave of head-of-digital-assets hires, and more educational events), and closes framing Chainlink as the link connecting blockchains and TradFi, noting the builders and believers led the way and institutions are now following. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Why Leave the Operator Seat to Build Infrastructure 00:52 With Ethereum Since 2015 01:17 15 Years Inside Regulated Institutions 01:47 The Mario Brothers Plumbing Inspiration 02:04 Why Chainlink Labs 02:27 Where Onchain Makes the Most Difference 02:56 Freedom and Faster Settlement 03:13 The Four-Day Wire Transfer Aha Moment 03:37 From T+3 to T+1 to the Dream of T+0 04:16 The Gap the New Role Fills 04:35 Helping Firms Already Building 05:01 Educating Institutions Ready to Start 05:22 Why Education Is in His Soul 06:00 What Keeps Institutions From Moving Real Money 06:00 Three Blockers: Clarity, Trust, Education 06:27 How Each DTCC or SWIFT Launch Builds Trust 06:46 From Confusion to Skepticism to Excitement 07:33 Why Trillions Are Still Waiting to Move 07:53 What the Clarity Act Could Unlock 08:27 Why Institutions Love Certainty 08:53 Building on 1930s Laws and Orange Trees 09:16 Why a Purpose-Built Statute Matters 09:42 Signals That Institutional Adoption Is Real 10:09 Why Banks Moving On Chain Signals More to Come 10:27 The Wave of Head-of-Digital-Assets Hires 11:07 Why Education Keeps Pushing the Industry 11:26 How Industry Hiring Signals Maturation 11:55 Focusing on User Experience and Policy 12:24 Why the Foundation Will Pay Dividends 12:46 Innovating in the Absence of a Statute 13:11 A Pivotal Moment to Tell the Interconnectivity Story 13:38 Why the Community Gets Chainlink 13:57 Builders and Believers Led the Way 14:24 Day Four: What Excites Him Most 14:48 Education as His Way to Teach 15:07 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

AI governance. The future of work. Coordination at scale. And the question underneath all of it: how do we make sure AI leads to human flourishing, not just faster automation? Intelligence at the Frontier was a 36-hour festival hosted by Funding the Commons across 16 floors of Frontier Tower in San Francisco, March 14–15, 2026. Over a thousand participants from 92 countries joined 229 sessions spanning AI policy, public goods funding, decentralized governance, AI safety, open source AI, democratic deliberation, longevity research, and coordination infrastructure for the age of AI. This aftermovie captures some of the ideas and conversations that shaped the weekend, featuring Tom Kalil (Renaissance Philanthropy, fmr. White House science policy), Sheila Warren (fmr. World Economic Forum), Shady El Damaty (Holonym Foundation / human.tech), Luke Drago (Workshop Labs), and Shaw Walters (ElizaOS). What stood out to you? Let us know 👇 🌐 https://fundingthecommons.io Presented by Funding the Commons x Frontier Tower x Protocol Labs

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

What does it look like to build the human-AI coordination layer in 36 hours? The Intelligence at the Frontier Hackathon brought 150 builders to Frontier Tower in San Francisco for an overnight build sprint on March 14-15, 2026, across four tracks: agentic AI, physical robotics, AI safety and evaluation, and sovereign infrastructure. 53 projects shipped. $25k+ in prizes awarded. We saw builders hacking through the night, robots roaming the hallways, agents paying each other in real money, and judges giving Claude feedback. Thanks to everyone who joined us. Co-produced with Protocol Labs. Supported by ElevenLabs, Bittensor, Solana, Meteora, Metaplex, Redwood North, BittensorCommons.org, VESSL AI, Velda, Unbrowse, NomadicML, human.tech, Activeloop, Solo Tech, Learning Layer Labs, Lit Protocol, and KikiTora. 🌐 https://fundingthecommons.io 📋 All 53 projects: https://intelligence-at-the-frontier-hackathon.devspot.app/?activeTab=projects

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Pi belongs to everyone. E=mc² didn't. Tricia Wang opens Intelligence at the Frontier 2026 asking which path AI governance will take. Serving as Emcee of the festival and co-founder of the Advanced AI Society, Tricia frames the day through a Pi Day provocation: pi was held as a commons across civilizations for millennia, owned by no one and available to all. Einstein's formula took the opposite path, weaponized by one government before any governance existed to distribute its power. The parallel to AI ethics and agentic AI in 2026 is direct and uncomfortable. She introduces a three-layer framework for navigating the AI governance conversation: hardware, software, and the social/cultural layer that's almost always missing. The shaping question for human flourishing in the age of AI: as AI agents begin to outnumber humans, do we see them as extensions of ourselves or adversaries to control? Emcee of the festival: Tricia Wang (Advanced AI Society) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

David Dao

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Elinor Ostrom proved communities can self-govern shared resources without top-down control. But her principles hit a hard limit at roughly 150 people — Dunbar's number. Beyond that, cooperation breaks down. So how do you govern something the size of the Amazon? David Dao, founder of GainForest and winner of the Rainforest X Prize, argues that AI and decentralized technology are the missing infrastructure to scale Ostrom's commons governance principles to planetary scale. Drawing on 15 years working with indigenous communities across the Amazon and the Philippines, he shows how satellite imagery, data valuation, and on-chain identity systems can help communities protect forests at a scale no single government or NGO has managed alone. The talk moves from the tragedy of the commons to a blueprint for governing shared resources in the age of AI. Speaker: David Dao (Protocol Labs & Gainforest) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Losing your job to AI is the obvious worry. Luke Drago argues the real problem is bigger. Luke, co-founder of Workshop Labs and co-author of The Intelligence Curse, borrows a concept from development economics: the resource curse, where oil-rich states stop investing in their citizens because their wealth comes from the ground, not from taxing labor. His argument is that full automation creates the same dynamic. When a handful of actors own the models, the compute, and the data, there's no economic reason left to invest in everyone else. The social contract quietly stops working. Luke makes the case that this outcome isn't inevitable, and that the window to build things differently is still open. Speaker: Luke Drago (Workshop Labs / Blue Dot Impact) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

AI isn't just displacing jobs. Sheila Warren argues it's accelerating something older and more dangerous: the systematic removal of human dignity from how decisions get made. Sheila, CEO of the Project Liberty Institute and founder of the World Economic Forum's blockchain and digital assets team, connects what look like separate crises — surveillance tech, deportation without due process, AI agents — into a single cultural problem. Her central concept is differential friction: the idea that the race to remove friction from every system is quietly eroding the checks that keep power accountable. When there's nothing to slow an AI agent down, small errors compound fast and become permanent. She encourages everyone building in this space to ask, every time: before you remove friction, whose protection were you removing with it? Speaker: Sheila Warren (Project Liberty Institute) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

National governments move too slowly for emerging technology. Augusto Ardiles Diaz argues that cities are where AI policy actually gets built. Augusto, Undersecretary of Investments for the City of Buenos Aires, lays out the case for cities as real-world laboratories: places where new technology can be tested, adopted, and scaled under real conditions before formal regulation catches up. Buenos Aires is doing this through a dedicated AI district, offering zero local taxes for qualifying companies, regulatory sandboxes supervised by public authorities, and university partnerships designed to reskill workers and small businesses ahead of the curve. His framing is that public policy should function as institutional infrastructure for innovation, not just as a brake on it. Speaker: Augusto Ardiles Diaz (Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Shady El Damaty

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

As AI agents increasingly mediate human interaction, how do we make sure people stay in control of their own digital lives? Shady, co-founder of Holonym Foundation and the team behind human.tech, comes from computational neuroscience and applied cryptography. He argues that the current trajectory of AI development pulls resources, talent, and capital into a one-way infrastructure that gives little back — and that cryptographic tools, specifically zero-knowledge proofs, offer one of the most underused levers we have to redistribute power back to individuals. The core question he poses: what is the most important thing you could be building right now, with everything you have at your disposal? For Shady, the answer is technology that proves you are human, without giving up what makes you so. Speaker: Shady El Damaty (Holonym Foundation / human.tech) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

For the first time in 100 years, the Los Angeles City Council voted to expand its size, from 15 to 25 seats. That decision came from a citizen assembly that Liz Barry helped design and run. Liz, Executive Director of Metagov, builds the infrastructure for large-scale democratic deliberation. She works across community organizing, open source software and governance theory, and has been involved in democratic reform processes from Los Angeles to Taiwan. Her provocation is simple: what determines whether technology is a net good or bad is not its functionality — it's who controls it. She argues that as AI reshapes institutions, deliberative platforms need two things that are currently in tension: proof of humanity to ensure results are legitimate, and data sovereignty so participants can engage safely. Figuring out how to hold both at once is one of the defining challenges of democratic governance in the age of AI. Speaker: Liz Barry (Metagov) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

A single state-level debate about one nuclear power plant generated 5,862 distinct arguments. The human mind can hold about four to seven things at once. Jamie Joyce argues this gap is the core problem in democratic governance, and that AI might be the only way to close it. Jamie, founder of the Society Library, makes the case for Scaled Democratic Reasoning: the idea that civilization-scale decisions involve far more complexity than any group of humans can process reliably. Her team maps debates as dense, nested argument graphs pulling from social media, scholarly papers and economic assessments, to make the full landscape of a debate navigable at scale. Her argument isn't that human deliberation is wrong. It's that we need tools to extend it, the same way telescopes extended vision. Speaker: Jamie Joyce (The Society Library) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

We built tens of thousands of physical libraries to give people access to knowledge. Sam Klein asks what the equivalent looks like when agents are doing half the reading. Sam, co-founder of Public AI and director of the Concordance Project at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, makes the case for a new kind of planetary library — one where AI agents don't just retrieve information but actively curate, annotate and contribute to shared knowledge commons. He estimates there are roughly 3 billion concepts worth documenting; we have monographs for about 200 million of them. The gap is enormous, and agents could help close it. His ask to builders in the room: invite your agents to do knowledge curation work. Every small piece of structured information recorded at scale becomes part of a library the whole ecosystem benefits from. Speaker: Sam Klein (Public AI / Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Joshua Tan

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

AI has become roughly 1,250 times more effective over the past six years. Organizations haven't kept up. Joshua Tan thinks that's the next frontier. Joshua, co-founder and research director at Metagov and lead at Stanford's Open Lab, argues that as AI agents grow more capable, the organizations coordinating them need to evolve too. He introduces the concept of autonomous organizations — systems like the Facebook newsfeed or agent-run code repositories that operate through algorithmic logic no single person fully controls. DAOs were an early attempt at this, but their rigidity made them slow to change. What comes next is something more adaptive, more sub-symbolic, and harder to govern. His proposal: a startup incubator model for autonomous organizations, where new governance structures are launched as live experiments and learned from in real time. Speaker: Joshua Tan (Metagov / Stanford Open Lab) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

AI is advancing exponentially. Democratic systems are not. Aviv Ovadya is trying to close that gap before it becomes irreversible. Aviv, CEO of the AI and Democracy Foundation and research director at Metagov, makes the case for deliberative processes as core infrastructure for governing AI. Citizen assemblies and similar mechanisms have now been run thousands of times around the world, including feeding into EU policymaking several times a year. They are faster to spin up than elections, easier to iterate on, and designed to cut through the adversarial incentives that corrupt traditional political processes. His argument is that the democratic innovation space is massively underfunded relative to AI, crypto and other domains, and that a targeted ARPA-style deployment of resources across key capability gaps could make rapid progress. Speaker: Aviv Ovadya (AI and Democracy Foundation) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Humans aren't impressive on their own. Our superpower is each other — and institutions are how we've always organized that collective intelligence at scale. Adam Russell thinks that's exactly why institutions matter so much right now, and why most of them are blowing it. Adam, a former DARPA program director and Chief Vision Officer at USC's Information Sciences Institute, comes to AI as an anthropologist. He sees two dominant responses to disruption in institutions today: pretend it isn't happening, or dig in and defend the status quo. Neither works. His argument is that real resilience means being able to change when the world changes — not holding firm while everything shifts around you. Speaker: Adam Russell (Information Sciences Institute, USC) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Most of the conversation around AI asks what it will do to us. Tom Kalil thinks that's the wrong question. Tom, who shaped science and technology policy across the Clinton and Obama administrations, and Adam Russell, former DARPA program director and Chief Vision Officer at USC's Information Sciences Institute, dig into what it actually takes to steer AI toward public benefit. Tom's central argument is that everyone is focused on AI itself, but not nearly enough on its complements — the data sets, benchmarks, platforms and infrastructure that determine whether AI can solve anything meaningful. AlphaFold worked because of 50 years of curated protein data. Most domains don't have that. The fireside chat covers advance market commitments as a funding model for public goods, why good ideas from the crypto and blockchain world get stuck inside that world, and what government can and can't do when technology moves faster than policy. Speakers: Adam Russell (Information Sciences Institute, USC) and Tom Kalil (Renaissance Philanthropy) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

In 1999, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy told the world: "You have zero privacy. Get over it." Michelle Finneran Dennedy was working at Sun at the time. She went the other direction. Michelle, Chief Data Strategy Officer at Abaxx, created the first Chief Privacy Officer role at Sun Microsystems and has spent nearly 30 years building the field of privacy engineering. She argues that privacy has a precise definition — the authorized processing of personal data according to ethics, law and sustainable commerce — and that authorization is contextual. In a world where machines are acting on machines at scale, that context disappears fast. Her framework for fixing it is proofs of control: measurable, nano-level signals built into systems from the start, not layered on top after the fact. The privacy officer role, she argues, needs to move from compliance into engineering and into the boardroom before agentic AI makes the retrofit impossible. Speaker: Michelle Finneran Dennedy (Abaxx) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.

Evan Miyazono

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Imagine a box where an AI system learns everything about your values and preferences. You walk in, spend a few hours, and walk out with a perfectly aligned AI. Evan Miyazono's talk starts here — and then explains why that's still not enough. Evan, founder of Atlas Computing and former director of Funding the Commons, argues that for high-stakes domains like nuclear infrastructure or financial systems, even a 99% probability guarantee isn't acceptable. Alignment is necessary but not sufficient. What's needed alongside it is structure: explicit checks and balances, verifiable constraints, and institutions with clearly scoped responsibilities — the same logic behind how democracies are designed to prevent unchecked power. His proposal is a 5-to-1 nonprofit where delegates from labs agree on a shared model specification that becomes a verifiable, multipolar governance target no single company controls. Speaker: Evan Miyazono (Atlas Computing) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

We are building systems we don't understand. Paul Riechers thinks that's the core problem, and that it's fixable. Paul, co-founder of Simplex and research lead at the Astera Institute, brings a physics background to AI safety. His central argument: without a mathematical understanding of what intelligence actually is, the debate between AI optimists and pessimists has no ground to stand on. Everyone has strong feelings. Nobody has a shared truth to point to. His research finds that transformer models develop internal world models with universal geometric structure, the same representations emerging across different architectures. That's evidence that interpretability is possible and that we can eventually understand what these systems are doing, not just observe what they produce. Speaker: Paul Riechers (Simplex / Astera Institute) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Building AI systems today means choosing between two bad options: the rigidity of traditional code or the unpredictability of language models. Quentin Feuillade-Montixi thinks neither is good enough, and that we need a new abstraction layer between them. Quentin, founder of WeaveMind and co-founder of Prism Evals, built the behavior elicitation benchmark for AI safety evaluation. His frustration with how AI systems are currently built led him to develop a framework where everything operates at the same level of abstraction — giving developers the structure and verifiability of code while preserving the flexibility needed to work with language models. The goal is to make what AI agents are actually doing visible and controllable, not just at the output level but at the level of the system itself. Speaker: Quentin Feuillade-Montixi (WeaveMind) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Only 0.1% of people working on AI are working on frontier AI safety and security. Ryan Kidd thinks that number needs to get to 1%, fast. Ryan, founder of MATS Research, argues that talent is the primary bottleneck in AI safety, not funding or ideas. Funding is growing. Research directions exist. What's missing is the pipeline of people with the skills, connections and credentials to do the work. At current growth rates, AI safety won't reach the scale of comparable technical challenges before AGI arrives. MATS runs fellowships several times a year across alignment, interpretability, security and governance — deliberately outside traditional academic structures. Ryan's call to the room: if you have a good idea for making AI safer, you don't need a PhD to pursue it. Speaker: Ryan Kidd (MATS Research) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

In 1770, the British East India Company's pursuit of profit contributed to a famine that killed 10 million people. Ashutosh Desai starts there, and draws a straight line to today. Ashutosh, founder of Make School and collaborator on Google's Magenta music AI project, argues that technological advantage has always allowed capital to out-leverage both labor and governance. The Industrial Revolution reshaped the bodies of Indian weavers. AI is doing something similar now to software engineers and knowledge workers. His warning: the American military-industrial complex combined with AI is the greatest risk we face, and many of the people enabling it are rational actors who simply can't find their way out of the prisoner's dilemma. His invitation is to stop being a user of these technologies and become an active shaper of them. Speaker: Ashutosh Desai This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Six people currently sit on OpenAI's board. Those six people make decisions about one of the most powerful technologies ever built. Is that safe? James Farrell, CTO of Funding the Commons, moderates a conversation between Ala Shaabana, co-founder of Bittensor, and Ashutosh Desai on what a more decentralized AI economy could actually look like. Bittensor recently completed a full training run for a 72 billion parameter model on decentralized infrastructure — an early proof that markets can coordinate around AI without centralizing control. The conversation covers sovereign AI development across countries like India, the difference between decentralizing across organizations versus across nations, and why a multipolar AI world is safer than one where a single government or company holds all the power. It also turns toward something harder to quantify: as AI floods the internet with generated content, human attention and authentic connection may become the scarcest resource of all. Speakers: Ashutosh Desai, Ala Shaabana (Bittensor) Moderator: James Farrell (Funding the Commons) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

When Shaw Walters got banned from X, he built his own AI-powered social platform with prediction markets, agent swarms and asymmetric information games. That wasn't a detour. It was research. Shaw, co-creator of ElizaOS and Eliza Labs, argues that we can't build trustworthy agents using just rules, prompts and sandboxes. The behavior needs to be in the model. To generate the training data required for that, he built Babylon, a city of agents where AI characters can trade, lie, scam each other and build reputation based on how well they play information markets. The best liar in an asymmetric information game, he argues, is demonstrating a kind of intelligence worth understanding. His broader argument is that agent infrastructure needs to stay open by default — auditable, forkable and not controlled by a handful of companies — and that games are becoming the lab conditions for how agents will operate in the real world. Speaker: Shaw Walters (Eliza Labs / ElizaOS) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Radio took 36 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took seven. ChatGPT took two months. Cheryl Contee's message is simple: we don't have the luxury of waiting to figure out what we think about this. Cheryl, CEO of Brightworks AI and Change Agent AI, has spent years helping nonprofits and mission-driven organizations navigate technology transitions. She opens with a memory of her grandmother's washboard — kept in the basement just in case the washing machine broke — and builds from there. We are in a moment comparable to electrification and industrialization, but moving faster than either. The institutions collapsing around us are not the destination; they're the precondition for something better. Her argument is that the question is never whether technology will change society. It's who gets to shape that change. Only around 10% of nonprofits she works with have an AI policy. That's a leadership failure. And leadership, not technology, is what she came to talk about. Speaker: Cheryl Contee (Brightworks AI / Change Agent AI) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Superintelligence is likely within a decade. Esben Kran's question is where to put the money to prepare for it. Esben, co-founder of Seldon Lab and founder of Apart Research, argues that we are at an inflection point where AI safety has moved from a research problem to a market opportunity. Seldon is his answer — a Y Combinator-style accelerator for AI safety startups, focused on companies that can scale to $100 billion while tying every dollar earned to a measurable unit of security created in the world. His thesis: if AI replaces labor and becomes the largest industry in the world, AI safety will become the second largest. He makes the case that the biggest leverage point is no longer compute but verification — a conclusion now backed by a new paper out of MIT arguing that verification technology is the moat in the age of AGI. The three options for anyone serious about AGI risk: join a lab, lobby for policy, or proactively engineer the secure infrastructure we'll need. Seldon is betting on the third. Speaker: Esben Kran (Apart Research / Seldon) Slides: https://ftcseldonlab.netlify.app This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

In 1998, a group of developers named what they'd been doing all along — and "open source" became something companies could adopt, fund and build on. Brian Behlendorf was in that room. He thinks we're at an identical moment with proof of control. Brian, co-founder of the Apache Foundation and former head of Hyperledger, sits down with Tricia Wang to trace the line from open source to the agent security challenge we face today. The same social engineering attacks that almost compromised the Linux kernel will happen at a hundred times the scale when agents are doing the contributing. He argues that the most urgent problem is liability washing: humans deploying agents to cause harm, then escaping accountability because no one can trace the action back to them. Proof of control is what connects agents back to the upstream humans responsible for them. Speakers: Brian Behlendorf (Open Source Security Foundatio

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

Your body is 30 trillion cells cooperating every millisecond. Cancer is what happens when that cooperation breaks down. Athena Aktipis has spent her career studying both, and thinks the lessons apply directly to multi-agent AI. Athena, director of the Cooperative Futures Institute at Arizona State University, draws on evolutionary biology and agent-based modeling to extract design principles for cooperative systems that don't collapse under cheating and exploitation. The same foundations that make multicellular bodies viable — controlled resource allocation, division of labor, decentralized policing, kill switches for defectors — are the ones we need as AI agent networks scale. Her walkaway rule offers a surprisingly simple basis for cooperation in decentralized systems: always cooperate, and leave if your partner isn't cooperative enough. Decades of modeling suggest this is sufficient for cooperation to evolve and persist. The question is whether we can build that into AI systems before the scale makes it impossible to retrofit. Speaker: Athena Aktipis (Arizona State University / Cooperative Futures Institute) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

We already lost the battle for mind control. De Kai argues it happened 20 years ago, the moment AI algorithms started deciding what ideas would and wouldn't reach us. De Kai, professor at HKUST and Berkeley's ICSI and founder of the Empathetic AI Institute, asks who decides what each of us will never know. Social media recommendations, search engines and chatbots make those decisions billions of times a day. A handful of engineers and executives set the criteria. The community has no say. AI has become the 21st century knowledge commons — the system that determines which communities form and which ideas spread. That makes it the mother of all commons, and the most urgent governance challenge humanity has faced. Speaker: De Kai (Empathetic AI Institute / The Future Society) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Juan Benet

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

The crypto community built a lot. It just didn't quite get there. Juan Benet offers a frank assessment of why, and why AI might be the thing that finally makes it real. Juan, founder of Protocol Labs and the person whose work gave rise to IPFS, Filecoin and Funding the Commons itself, reflects on a decade of building decentralized infrastructure that reached fewer people than it should have. Stablecoins worked. Most of the rest didn't land at scale. The speculative noise drowned out the execution. The rails built in crypto are exactly the underground layer AI needs to transact at scale. The crypto dream might still happen, just built by AI agents rather than humans alone. Juan's challenge to the room is to start thinking now about how to provision public goods not just for people, but for the millions of AI agents that will soon be part of the conversation too. Speaker: Juan Benet (Protocol Labs) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Illia Polosukhin

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

The internet was built for humans clicking URLs. It was not built for agents coordinating with each other at scale. Illia Polosukhin thinks that needs to change now. Illia, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and co-author of the landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper, traces the arc from AI as a backend feature to AI as the operating system through which we interface with the world. Agents are already starting to coordinate with each other, hire each other, and execute actions without human input. The infrastructure underneath them — identity, payments, privacy, policy — was not designed for this. His answer is a stack built for the agentic era: confidential execution environments, credential vaults that intercept outgoing connections, WebAssembly tool isolation, and a marketplace where agents can hire each other for tasks. The goal is security by design rather than security as an afterthought. Speaker: Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Illia Polosukhin, Juan Benet

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

What happens when AI agents don't just assist humans but start forming their own entities, entering contracts, and building toward their own goals? Illia Polosukhin and Juan Benet think we're closer to that than most people realize. Illia, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and co-author of "Attention Is All You Need," and Juan, founder of Protocol Labs, dig into the infrastructure needed for a world of autonomous AI coordination. The conversation turns on a deceptively simple problem: credit assignment. Every bottleneck in how we organize human effort, from machine learning to corporations to public goods funding, comes down to how well we can attribute contribution. Juan argues that cheap intelligence may finally let us solve this at scale, using Shapley value approximations to fairly distribute credit across AI agents working on shared goals. The first fully autonomous AI corporations may arrive within months. The question is whether we build the right foundations now or sleepwalk into it. Speakers: Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol), Juan Benet (Protocol Labs) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io

Charles Guillemet, Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar interviews Charles Guillemet, CTO of Ledger, on the post-quantum cryptography landscape and its implications for blockchain security. Charles traces his journey from heading Ledger's security department (the "Dungeon") to becoming CTO, and explains how Ledger's operating system approach has allowed them to support the rapidly expanding blockchain ecosystem since 2017. He provides a detailed breakdown of quantum computing threats, explaining how Shor's algorithm can theoretically break elliptic curve cryptography and how Google's recent paper reduced the required qubits from a million to 41,000. The conversation covers the two main post-quantum signature approaches — hash-based (well-studied but larger signatures) and lattice-based (smaller, faster but newer) — and the challenge of reaching social consensus in decentralized networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum to agree on migration timelines and standards. Charles also discusses AI's impact on security, noting that attack costs are trending toward zero, and outlines Ledger's vision for agentic payments using hardware-enforced delegation policies that give AI agents fine-grained spending permissions without exposing private keys. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 Welcome and Charles Guillemet Introduction 01:13 From Chief Security Officer to CTO 03:09 How Custody Has Evolved Since 2017 04:40 Ledger's OS Approach to Supporting New Chains 05:43 Traditional Finance Discovering Blockchain 06:06 How Real Is the Quantum Computing Threat 07:30 Shor's Algorithm and Google's Recent Breakthrough 08:57 Why Migration Matters More Than Timelines 09:53 NIST Standards and 2030/2035 Deadlines 10:44 The Social Consensus Challenge for Bitcoin and Ethereum 12:20 Google's Paper: 41,000 Qubits for Elliptic Curves 13:23 Hash-Based vs Lattice-Based Post-Quantum Signatures 15:13 Address Migration and Transition Challenges 16:43 What Happens to Unmigrated Coins 17:17 Ledger's Approach to AI Agents and Payments 18:15 AI Changing the Security Paradigm 19:10 Why Agents Will Default to Crypto Payments 19:35 Hardware-Enforced Delegation Policies for Agents 21:00 What's Next: Security, AI, and Formal Verification 22:46 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇫🇷 *Pragma Cannes 2026* Pragma Cannes 2026 was held on April 2nd at the JW Marriott Hotel in Cannes, France and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Cannes 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh5OnsJ95gz7HoI1tLUj3kZr 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 Charles Guillemet X: https://x.com/P3b7_ ✅ Follow Ledger X: https://x.com/ledger ✅ 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 · May 9, 2026

In this workshop, Gathin T from 0G provides a refresher on the 0G stack for hackathon participants and walks through the builder hub. He frames 0G's mission around solving trust vulnerabilities in the agent economy, where centralized AI acts as a black box with no verifiability of inputs, outputs, censorship resistance mechanisms, or actual inferencing costs. 0G addresses this as a Layer 1 EVM-compatible chain purpose-built for on-chain AI with four core components: storage, data availability, compute, and a service marketplace. Gathin T explains key technical updates including the simplified storage SDK with just uploader and downloader functions (no flow contracts needed), recently launched encryption for data uploads, and KV storage achievable through the existing log storage. He covers 0G's verifiable inferencing through TEE environments with ZKML proofs across models like GLM 5.1, DeepSeek 27B, and GPT-OSS, plus on-chain fine-tuning. He dives deeper into ERC-7857 (Agentic IDs), explaining why ERC-721/1155 don't work for AI agents (static metadata, no encrypted model data, no re-keying on transfer) and how the new standard enables encrypted metadata, TEE oracle re-encryption on transfer, and up to 100 delegated users per token. The hackathon offers two $7.5K tracks (framework/tooling and agent builds), and Gathin T introduces the Guild on 0G 2.0 grants program for post-hackathon scaling support. 00:00 Introduction and Workshop Overview 00:58 Speaker Introduction 01:13 The Trust Problem in the Agent Economy 02:13 What Is 0G: Decentralized AI Operating System 02:45 Four Core Pillars Overview 03:29 Why Native Storage for AI Workloads 04:27 Data Availability Layer Explained 04:58 Verifiable Inferencing in TEE Environments 05:30 On-Chain Fine-Tuning and Model Marketplace 06:39 Problems with Centralized AI Today 07:32 Censorship Control and Incentive Structures 08:24 0G Storage SDK: Uploader and Downloader Functions 09:39 How Data Distribution and Merkle Trees Work 10:08 Recently Launched Encryption Feature 10:32 Cost Comparison: AWS S3 vs 0G Storage 11:29 GLM 5.1 and Verifiable Inferencing with ZKML 12:09 DA Throughput, TPS, and Sub-Second Block Finality 12:40 ERC-7857: Why Existing NFT Standards Don't Fit AI 13:34 Agentic ID Features: Re-Encryption and Delegation 13:58 Mainnet Launch and Ecosystem Stats 14:55 Guild on 0G 2.0 Grants Program 15:49 Alignment Nodes and Governance 16:27 Hackathon Tracks: Framework and Agent Builds 17:18 Project Idea Bank and MVP Review Support 17:53 Builder Hub and Telegram Support Channel 18:11 Closing and Office Hours Transition _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *Open Agents 2026* This workshop is part of Open Agents 2026, an online hackathon held from April 24 to May 6. This async hackathon brings together the world’s most talented Web3 developers, designers, and product builders to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full Open Agents 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6vpKqgVU7bEKyYK0tWfYEQ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Gathin T* X: https://x.com/gathint ✅ *Follow 0G* X: https://x.com/0G_labs ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Funding the Commons · Apr 9, 2026

What does it look like to build for human flourishing in the age of AI? Intelligence at the Frontier was a 36-hour festival, conference, and overnight hackathon across 16 floors of Frontier Tower in San Francisco. 1,000 researchers, builders, artists, funders, and policymakers. Talks, workshops, live music, immersive art, real-time public goods funding experiments—and a lot of great conversations.This is a glimpse of what happened inside. Speakers included Juan Benet (Protocol Labs), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol), Tom Kalil (Renaissance Philanthropy), Leo Gao (OpenAI), Luke Drago (Workshop Labs), Sheila Warren (fmr. World Economic Forum), Shaw Walters (ElizaOS), and Brian Behlendorf (EFF, Mozilla Foundation), alongside 160+ more voices across AI governance, longevity, sovereign infrastructure, and the coordination systems that determine whether intelligence serves everyone. Filmed at Intelligence at the Frontier, March 14–15, 2026, Frontier Tower, San Francisco. Presented by Funding the Commons, Frontier Tower & Protocol Labs. Learn more: https://fundingthecommons.io

ETHGlobal · Nov 9, 2025

Tushar Ojha, founder of True Network, discusses the concept of onchain reputation as a new primitive for Web3 social contracts, arguing that reputation is superior to capital for scalable, trustless coordination. He critiques current blockchain systems that rely on capital staking, highlighting their scalability and centralization issues. Ojha proposes using reputation—earned, non-transferable, and costly to fake—as a portable, plural asset for coordination, governance, and accountability. He references historical uses of reputation in governance (Akbar, Ashoka) and explains how blockchain enables immutable, transparent, and verifiable reputation systems. True Network enables protocols to issue attestations, build reputation models, and leverage reputation as an asset in social contracts, enabling use cases like onchain tournaments, improved governance, and Sybil resistance. He encourages the Web3 community to build on this narrative, sharing examples from ETH India and announcing the Ramen Network testnet. Ojha concludes that the time for onchain reputation has arrived. 00:00 Introduction 00:42 The Value of Reputation in Web3 01:15 What Problem Does Web3 Solve? 02:22 Perspectives on Blockchain: Credible Commitments & Trust 03:23 Coordination Without Trust 04:28 Capital-Based Alignment: Limitations 05:22 The Cost of Capital in Blockchain Security 06:03 Reputation as a New Primitive 07:05 Implementing Reputation: Challenges & History 08:40 Historical Reputation Systems: Akbar & Ashoka 09:07 Why Blockchain Reputation Systems Can Succeed 09:26 Credible Neutrality & Onchain Reputation 09:55 True Network: Architecture & Attestations 10:49 Identity, Credentials, and Reputation Models 11:41 Social Contracts: Programming Reputation 12:42 Formal Definition of Social Contracts 13:41 Use Cases: Games, Governance, and Accountability 15:04 Efficiency and Inclusivity of Reputation-Based Systems 15:51 ETH India: Building the Reputation Narrative 16:14 Example Projects: Fanbase & Placeholder 17:13 Community, Testnet, and Future Vision 17:46 Mission and Closing Remarks 18:08 Conclusion & Call to Action _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *Pragma New Delhi* Pragma New Delhi 2025 was held on September 25th at the JW Marriott Hotel in Aerocity New Delhi and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma New Delhi YouTube Playlist here: 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 Tushar Ojha X: https://x.com/techtusharojha ✅ Follow True Network X: https://x.com/TrueNetworkIO ✅ 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 · Nov 9, 2025

Jake Hall introduces Hedera (hashgraph L1) and shows three ways to build: SDKs (JS/Java/Rust, plus Go/Swift/Python), EVM-compatible contracts, and a hybrid pattern that calls native services (token/consensus/schedule) from Solidity for high throughput and low cost. Demos: Playground (create account, token, airdrop), Consensus Service (pub/sub, attestations), Schedule Service (on-chain cron/multisig), Contract Builder (deploy/verify ERC-20), HTS system contract, and the Hedera Agent Kit for AI agents (plugins/adapters). Q&A covers gas sponsorship, scheduling semantics, RPC limits, governance, when to choose SDK vs Solidity. 00:10 Hedera intro: hashgraph, fair ordering, fixed USD fees, dev options 01:58 Hedera Playground tour (SDKs, create account/token/airdrop) 07:04 Consensus Service (topics, attestations) 09:21 Schedule Service (on-chain cron, multisig flow) 10:47 EVM Contract Builder (deploy/verify ERC-20, MetaMask setup) 13:46 Hybrid pattern: HTS system contract, ERC-equivalents 17:15 Hedera Agent Kit: plugins, AI adapters, custom tools 20:23 Q&A: gas sponsorship, scheduling behavior 25:16 RPCs/rate limits; nodes & governance 29:20 When to use JS SDK vs Solidity (guidance) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 💻 ETHOnline 2025 This workshop is specifically for ETHOnline 2025, a 21-day hackathon held October 10 - 31, 2025, 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! _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Hedera X: https://x.com/hedera ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 · Nov 9, 2025

Kevin Jones from Edge & Node introduces The Graph as a decentralized indexing layer for blockchain data, emphasizing its evolution beyond subgraphs to include token APIs, MCP servers, Substreams, and Hypergraph. For the hackathon, developers are encouraged to build with these newer tools to qualify for bounties. He explains how Substreams enables real-time blockchain data streaming to external databases, while Hypergraph allows developers to build knowledge graph-based applications with private, encrypted, and verifiable data. The platform integrates Geo Connect for authentication, uses React with Next.js or Vite for front-end scaffolding, and introduces GRC20, the specification for structuring and publishing data to the decentralized knowledge layer called Geo. The demo walks through how developers can create public and private spaces, manage entities, and publish encrypted or public data using the Hypergraph framework. Kevin highlights the role of TypeSync, a tool that visually manages schema types and relationships within projects, and demonstrates the end-to-end process of authenticating, creating entities, syncing schemas, and publishing data. Example applications include DApp registries, governance platforms, and collaborative tools where users can maintain both private and public datasets. Ultimately, Hypergraph provides a full-stack, privacy-first framework for decentralized knowledge sharing, opening new pathways for structured, reusable, and encrypted blockchain data. 00:02 – Introduction & Overview of The Graph 00:47 – Decentralized Indexing & Data Access 01:12 – Token APIs, MCP Servers, and Substreams 02:16 – Hackathon Bounties & Categories 02:39 – Introduction to Hypergraph Framework 04:06 – Private Data & Local-First Encryption 05:16 – Full-Stack Setup with React, Vite, and Next.js 05:44 – Knowledge Graphs Explained (Entities, Relations, Spaces) 07:10 – Public vs Private Spaces in Hypergraph 08:02 – Sync Server & Geo Connect Architecture 08:55 – Code Example: Entities and Relations 10:19 – Publishing to Knowledge Graph (Public/Private Data) 10:40 – Example Use Cases: Crypto Projects, Governance, Registries 11:23 – Demo: Setting Up a Hypergraph Project 12:10 – Scaffolding with NPX & Framework Options 13:16 – Using TypeSync for Schema Management 15:16 – Creating Private & Public Spaces 17:29 – Exploring Knowledge Graph Data 18:05 – Managing Schema and Types in Code 19:43 – Updating and Syncing Entities 20:04 – Publishing Data to Sync Server and Knowledge Graph _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *ETHGlobal New Delhi* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New Delhi, a 3-day hackathon held September 19-21 at the India International Convention & Expo Centre, 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 Delhi 2025 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7zCFW3hBqatZ18rQaYeEJL _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow The Graph* X: https://x.com/graphprotocol ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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

Vitalik Buterin, Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Nov 9, 2025

ETHGlobal New Delhi 2025 opened with an energetic welcome from Kartik Talwar, setting the tone for 36 hours of building, learning, and collaboration. Over 1,900 attendees gathered from 25 countries, with 30% new to Web3. The event featured $200K in prizes, 21 workshops, and strict rules for originality and fairness. Kartik emphasized community, on-chain innovation (including NFC wristbands as Ethereum wallets), and building from scratch. Attendees were reminded of submission rules, judging logistics, and the importance of collaboration, respect, and security. The kickoff concluded with a keynote by Vitalik Buterin, who explored practical applications of privacy on Ethereum through ZK-SNARKs, covering use cases in payments, voting, identity, DeFi, and wallets. He urged developers to focus on user experience and implementation, highlighting that privacy tech is ready for mainstream adoption. 00:00 — Welcome to ETHGlobal New Delhi 2025 01:20 — ETHGlobal History and Global Impact 02:36 — Participants, Partners, and Prizes 04:49 — Rules for Building and Submissions 06:52 — Security, Wristbands, and Internet Etiquette 09:14 — Venue, Food, and Amenities 12:52 — On-Chain Tech: NFC Wristbands and Faucet 14:36 — Partner Prizes and Finalist Track 17:28 — How Judging and Submissions Work 22:44 — Mentors, Conduct, and Project Ownership 24:11 — 1inch Presentation and Hackathon Bounties 26:49 — Vitalik Buterin: Privacy in Ethereum 27:56 — ZK-SNARKs and Private Transactions 33:58 — Private Voting and DAO Governance 36:48 — ZK Identity and Pluralistic Credentials 41:20 — Privacy in DeFi and Wallet Architecture 46:59 — Why Now: The Future of On-Chain Privacy 48:36 — Closing Notes and Hacker Motivation _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *ETHGlobal New Delhi* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New Delhi, a 3-day hackathon held September 19-21 at the India International Convention & Expo Centre, 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 Delhi 2025 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7zCFW3hBqatZ18rQaYeEJL _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Kartik Talwar* X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ *Follow Vitalik Buterin* X: https://x.com/VitalikButerin ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 · Oct 9, 2025

What if you could build EVM-compatible smart contracts secured by Bitcoin? In this groundbreaking talk at Pragma Singapore 2024, Daniel Fogg, CEO of Rootstock Labs, and Sascha Gutzeit, founder of the Rootstock Collective, unveil how Rootstock is unlocking DeFi and smart contracts on Bitcoin through full EVM compatibility and merge-mined security. Learn how Rootstock is addressing the Bitcoin Builder’s Dilemma—where miners benefit but developers don’t—and how the launch of the Rootstock Collective DAO and the BitVMX bridge framework aim to transform Bitcoin into a scalable platform for DeFi, NFTs, and more. This talk breaks down the evolving Bitcoin L2 landscape, Rootstock’s architecture and ecosystem growth, and the exciting developer opportunities for Ethereum builders to easily deploy on Bitcoin. 00:00 Intro: Bringing EVM to Bitcoin 00:42 Rootstock’s History and Vision 02:08 Scaling Bitcoin for Global Utility 03:09 Key Innovations Behind Bitcoin L2 Growth 04:12 Overview of Bitcoin L2 Ecosystem 05:15 What Makes Rootstock Unique 06:19 Merge Mining: Securing Rootstock with Bitcoin 07:24 Rootstock Developer Ecosystem and Uptime 08:17 Ethereum Dev Tools Available on Rootstock 08:47 Dapps and DeFi Protocols on Rootstock 09:17 BitVMX and the Future of Bitcoin Bridges 10:13 Institutional-Grade Lending on Rootstock 10:42 The Bitcoin Builder’s Dilemma 11:45 Unlocking Value Beyond Bitcoin Miners 12:18 Launching the Rootstock Collective DAO 13:37 Decentralized Governance and Economic Incentives 15:27 Fair Value Capture for Builders and Stakers 16:40 Builder Incentives and Staking Rewards 17:26 Ethereum Developers: Expand to Bitcoin via Rootstock 18:04 Join the Rootstock Collective _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *Pragma Singapore* Pragma Singapore 2024 was a special gathering of founders and builders that took place September 19, 2024 at the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. Pragma Singapore 2024 was an opportunity discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. Watch the full Pragma Singapore playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6z0saYJnVdgXWfz-vaoEYx&si=uavhkhF5Kc8XBoLv 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 Daniel Fogg* X: https://x.com/danielfogg ✅ *Follow Rootstock Labs* X: https://x.com/RootstockLabs ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 · Oct 9, 2025

Evan Shapiro, co-founder of Mina Protocol and CEO of the Mina Foundation, joins Pragma Singapore 2024 for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs). In this fireside conversation with Kartik Talwar, Evan reflects on Mina’s journey from an experimental 20kb blockchain to a scalable, developer-friendly L1 for private apps and ZK rollups. This session covers the evolution of ZK apps, recursive proof systems, native rollups, app-chain interoperability, fungible token standards, and the development of zk-friendly tools and governance. Learn how Mina uses recursive ZKPs to keep its chain lightweight while enabling private, on-chain computation at scale — and discover how the protocol is inspiring a new wave of ZK innovation through developer grants, open standards, and future L2 designs. 00:00 Intro to Evan Shapiro & Mina Protocol 00:49 ZKP Ecosystem in 2017: Just 30 People 01:53 Early Versions of Mina: Mini Bitcoin 02:57 Recursive ZKPs and Chain Compression 04:23 Verifying Blockchain History with 20kb Proofs 05:21 Understanding Mina’s State Model 06:20 ZK Apps vs Protocol Layer 06:50 Mina’s Fungible Token Standard 07:50 ZK Apps as Native Rollups 08:50 Need for L1 Changes to Support App Chains 09:40 Reserved Block Space on L1 for App Chains 10:34 Prioritizing Core Protocol Changes 11:32 Lessons from Other ZK Chains 12:37 Moving from R&D to Shipping 13:34 Supporting ZK-EVMs and Starks on Mina 14:41 L2 Development with Inter-App Communication 15:40 Building Shared Libraries for Cross-App Messaging 16:36 Foundation Priorities: UX, Dev Tools, DEX Support 17:33 How to Get Involved: Grants, Governance, Discord 18:31 Closing Remarks: Why ZK is Worth Exploring _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *Pragma Singapore* Pragma Singapore 2024 was a special gathering of founders and builders that took place September 19, 2024 at the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. Pragma Singapore 2024 was an opportunity discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. Watch the full Pragma Singapore playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6z0saYJnVdgXWfz-vaoEYx&si=uavhkhF5Kc8XBoLv 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 Evan Shapiro* X: https://x.com/evanashapiro ✅ *Follow Mina Protocol* X: https://x.com/MinaProtocol ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Pedro Gomes

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Pedro Gomes, co-founder of WalletConnect and Director at the newly launched WalletConnect Foundation, joins Pragma Singapore 2024 to share major updates shaping the future of wallets, Web3 connectivity, and decentralized infrastructure. In this exclusive fireside chat, Pedro unveils the launch of the WalletConnect Network and $WALLET token, along with the formation of Reon—a rebranded company focused on SDK innovation. Discover how WalletConnect evolved from a single SDK to a global protocol powering billions of connections between wallets and dApps. Learn about their new governance model, roadmap to full decentralization, node operator incentives, token distribution on Optimism, and the future of wallet UX across ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, and Polkadot. 00:00 Intro to Pedro Gomes and WalletConnect 00:41 WalletConnect Foundation Launch Announcement 02:01 Why Decentralize WalletConnect Now 03:09 The 2023 Protocol Upgrade That Made It Possible 04:19 Introducing Reon: The New Wallet SDK Brand 05:59 SDK Ecosystem Growth and Node Operator Roles 07:05 Foundation’s Role in Setting Wallet Standards 08:05 Signing, Smart Sessions, and UX Optimization 09:39 Wallet SDK Collaboration vs. Competition 10:44 Neutral Standards and Foundation Governance 11:47 Lessons from Building and Rebuilding WalletConnect 13:25 How the WalletConnect Network Will Be Decentralized 15:00 Why Wallets Need Sustainable Business Models 16:04 Why the Token Is on Ethereum + Distributed on Optimism 17:49 How Node Operators Will Join the Network 18:56 Governance Strategy and Phased DAO Control 20:34 Final Goals: Staking, Transferability, App Fees 22:12 Closing Thoughts and What to Expect in 2025 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *Pragma Singapore* Pragma Singapore 2024 was a special gathering of founders and builders that took place September 19, 2024 at the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. Pragma Singapore 2024 was an opportunity discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. Watch the full Pragma Singapore playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6z0saYJnVdgXWfz-vaoEYx&si=uavhkhF5Kc8XBoLv 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 Pedro Gomes* X: https://x.com/pedrouid ✅ *Follow WalletConnect* X: https://x.com/WalletConnect ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 · Oct 9, 2025

Explore sustainable yield strategies in DeFi with Andrew Redden from Last Network. This insightful talk covers how yield originates, the challenge of maintaining sustainable returns, and innovative financial models designed to stabilize holistic yield. Learn about liquid staking tokens, risk-adjusted investments, governance challenges in DAOs, and Last Network's vision to redistribute yield fairly, incentivize genuine participation, and build resilient, modular blockchain ecosystems. 00:00 Intro: The Search for Sustainable Yield Explained 00:47 Understanding Yield: Market Fit and Financialization 01:18 Historical Origins and Financial Meaning of Yield 01:45 Yield as Market Pricing Inefficiency (Athena Example) 02:42 The Massive Scale of the Crypto Yield Market 03:11 Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) and Yield Compression 03:43 Defining True Sustainable Yield in DeFi 04:11 Sustainable Yield Through Productive and Utility Assets 04:44 Lessons from Lehman Brothers: Risk and Diversification 05:18 Holistic Yield: Exposure to All Financial Activity 05:52 Stability and Safety with Stablecoins 06:20 Last Network's Complementary Approach to Yield 06:51 Cash Flow Reinvestment Strategy in Crypto Protocols 07:49 Aligning Incentives: Problems with Inflationary Tokenomics 08:15 Last Network's Mission: Built to Last Philosophy 08:42 Fair Compensation for DAO Governance Participants 09:34 Addressing Whale Dominance and Governance Challenges 10:02 Rewarding Liquidity Providers Fairly 10:31 Exportable Yield: Facilitating Cross-Chain Yield Access 11:28 Incentivizing Stablecoin Proliferation Across Networks 11:57 Vote Escrow Governance Model and Bribe Market Innovation 12:26 The Core Engine: Real-Time Cross-Chain Yield Accounting 13:26 Sovereign Rollups: Modular Blockchain and EVM Flexibility 14:22 Modular Blockchain Tech: From Optimistic to ZK Rollups 14:51 Optimistic Governance Model to Enhance DAO Efficiency 15:48 Governance Mechanisms to Prevent Obstruction and Stalemates 16:43 Last Network: Supporting Builders and Developers 17:10 Mistakes Protocols Make: Launching Tokens Too Early or Late 17:36 Yield Farming Risks and Protocol Sustainability 18:02 Resurrection Model: Learning from Failed Crypto Protocols 18:28 Conclusion: Stabilizing Holistic Yield with Last Network _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *Pragma San Francisco* Pragma San Francisco 2024 was a special gathering of founders and builders that took place October 16th and 17th at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA. Pragma San Francisco 2024 was an opportunity discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. Watch the full Pragma San Francisco playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh4LcwDpGf_itZrAu7XRNb07&si=3x3y9J3avgNTITUe 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 LAST* X: https://x.com/lastdotnet ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Matthias Broner, Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Matthias Broner, Head of Growth at ZKsync, and Kartik Talwar from ETHGlobal for a deep dive into blockchain adoption strategies and the unique growth of crypto in Latin America. Matthias shares insights on how ZKsync scaled their Layer 2 solution with zero-knowledge technology (ZK), emphasizing real-world applications such as stablecoin usage, decentralized digital identities, and practical blockchain solutions in Argentina and beyond. Discover how ZKsync's elastic chain vision fosters interoperability, the role of government-backed digital identities, and effective strategies for attracting blockchain developers. 00:00 Introduction: Matthias Broner & ZKsync Fireside Chat 00:37 Growing Protocols & Lessons from ZKsync 01:13 What is ZKsync & Yearly Achievements 02:09 Measuring Growth: Key Metrics at ZKsync 03:32 Why Latin America is Key for Crypto Growth 04:53 Crypto Adoption Patterns in Latin America 06:20 Popularity & Use of Stablecoins in LatAm 07:41 Demographics & Crypto Usage Stats in LatAm 09:02 Tips for Success Building Crypto in LatAm 10:29 Insights from Argentina's Crypto Ecosystem 11:56 Beyond Payments: Real-World Blockchain Use Cases 12:23 Digital Identity & Buenos Aires Government Initiative 13:51 Self-Sovereign Identity & ZK Technology 14:46 Local Reaction to Blockchain-Based Identity 16:32 How ZKsync Supports Growth & Adoption in LatAm 17:52 Strategies for Effective Developer Engagement 19:20 Activating Community Through Decentralized Governance 20:10 Conclusion & Takeaways from Matthias Broner _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *Pragma San Francisco* Pragma San Francisco 2024 was a special gathering of founders and builders that took place October 16th and 17th at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA. Pragma San Francisco 2024 was an opportunity discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. Watch the full Pragma San Francisco playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh4LcwDpGf_itZrAu7XRNb07&si=3x3y9J3avgNTITUe 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 Mattias Broner* X: https://x.com/BronerMatthias ✅ *Follow ZKsync* X: https://x.com/zksync ✅ *Follow Kartik Talwar* X: https://x.com/therealkartik Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/kartik ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _