ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

Rostislav Totev, founder and CEO of Altcoins.bg, argues that the question is no longer whether digital assets join traditional finance but who builds regulated, reliable infrastructure that can scale. Behind a simple buy button sit identity checks, sanctions and wallet screening, the travel rule, custody and reconciliation, and he says trust and operational experience are the parts that cannot be copied. He tells how the company grew from one man and a laptop in 2017 to a MiCA licence in July, rebuilding most of its infrastructure in the final month because partners could not get licensed. A licence, he says, only gives the right to compete; the future is specialised regulated firms working together. Keynote at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speaker ▸ Rostislav Totev, Founder and CEO, Altcoins.bg Rostislav Totev is the Founder & CEO of Altcoins.bg, a Bulgarian crypto exchange licensed under MiCA. He is focused on bridging traditional finance and the digital asset economy and making crypto more accessible, secure and integrated into everyday financial services. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rostislav-totev Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:16 The buy button and the system behind it 02:46 What cannot be copied: trust and experience 04:14 From buying Bitcoin to working inside finance 05:24 Altcoins.bg: from one man and a laptop 07:46 The MiCA licence: repairing the engine while driving 09:50 The licence is not the business 12:26 Build, partner or acquire crypto infrastructure 14:02 Passporting the licence into the EU 15:07 Make crypto infrastructure boring 16:41 Specialised regulated firms working together 19:53 Q&A: Why use a regulated exchange instead of Uniswap? 21:43 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org

ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

Assoc. Prof. Manyu Moravenov, CEO of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange, asks what the capital market infrastructure of the future will look like, and whether it can become Europe's next growth engine. He argues that blockchain is moving from experiment to infrastructure inside regulated markets, pointing to the Eurosystem's new Pontes service for settling tokenised assets in central bank money and the European Commission's plan to broaden the DLT Pilot Regime. He sets three conditions for scale: trust, which exchanges and depositories already provide; a digital cash leg, so securities and money move together; and interoperability, so tokenisation does not create new fragmentation. For a smaller market like Bulgaria, he concludes, the goal is not a separate digital market but to make the capital market itself digital. Keynote at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speaker ▸ Assoc. Prof. Manyu Moravenov, Ph.D., MRICS, Member of the Board and CEO of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange Assoc. Prof. Manyu Moravenov, Ph.D., MRICS, is CEO and Board Member of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange. With 25+ years of experience in finance and capital markets, he has led the BSE's transformation, driving market growth and the successful launch of the BEAM SME market. He is also a European Climate Pact Ambassador. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manyumoravenov Chapters 00:00 The capital market infrastructure of the future 00:55 From experiments to scale: Pontes and the DLT Pilot Regime 03:41 Born-digital instruments and technology neutrality 05:35 Trust and the role of exchanges 07:00 Digitising the cash side of the transaction 08:28 Interoperability as Europe's growth engine 12:30 Closing titles Blockchain Week Bulgaria: https://www.blockchainweek.bg ETHSofia: https://www.ethsofia.com Future Finance Forum: https://www.blockchainweek.bg/f3 Follow Blockchain Week Bulgaria X: https://x.com/BWBulgaria LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockchain-week-bulgaria Follow ETHSofia X: https://x.com/EthSofiaBG LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethsofia Telegram: https://t.me/+b-33LJUpAB5iODNk Nothing in this video is financial advice. About the organiser Blockchain Week Bulgaria, ETHSofia and the Future Finance Forum are organised by the Bithope Foundation, founded in 2014 by Vladislav Dramaliev. Inspired by Andreas Antonopoulos, it is Europe's first non-profit operating exclusively with bitcoin donations. Over more than ten years, it has supported 50+ charitable campaigns, and in January 2016 it co-founded the Sofia Crypto Meetup, now the region's longest-running monthly crypto event. https://bithope.org

ETHSofia · Oct 6, 2026

With Preslav Nakov (MBZUAI, moderator), Hristo Todorov (DiscreteStack), Prof. Simeon Stoyanov (Brains++ / Discoverer) and Milan de Reede (NanoGPT). Moderated by Preslav Nakov, the panel asks what it means for business data to be local and how anyone can prove it. Hristo Todorov defines sovereign AI by transparency, control and cost predictability and argues that 95% of businesses need no smarter models than today's, while Milan de Reede sees local as running on devices you control and urges Europe to prioritise compute and data centres over frontier models, though he worries how far it lags the US and China. Disagreeing with de Reede, Prof. Simeon Stoyanov warns that idle data centres still draw 40 to 50% of peak power, so infrastructure should follow demand. Nakov raises agentic systems, and audience questions cover an AI bubble and regulation. Panel at Future Finance Forum 2026, 25 September 2026, Sofia. Part of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026. Speakers ▸ Preslav Nakov, Professor at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) (moderator) Professor for NLP at MBZUAI and Chair at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/preslavnakov ▸ Hristo Todorov, CEO at DiscreteStack Hristo Todorov, founder of DiscreteStack, is a software engineer and entrepreneur with experience across telecom, fintech and aviation. He co-founded Upnetix and CleverPine, and founded DiscreteStack in 2025 to help organisations use advanced AI while retaining control over their data and infrastructure. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hristotodorov ▸ Prof. Simeon Stoyanov, Business Development Director, Brains++ / Discoverer Prof. Simeon Stoyanov manages Bulgaria's first AI factory, BRAIN++, and has over 20 years of R&D leadership. He helps organisations leverage AI, high-performance computing and data science to accelerate innovation, optimise decision-making and turn advanced research into business value. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simeon-stoyanov-4834b544 ▸ Milan de Reede, Co-Founder and CEO, NanoGPT Milan co-founded and runs NanoGPT, offering privacy-friendly access to all AI models and tools. Milan has a long history in crypto, having been in Bitcoin since 2012 and having been crypto lead at the Dutch Central Bank. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milandereede Chapters 00:00 Introduction: what does local mean? 03:04 How do you prove data stays local? 04:50 Storage, processing or access? 06:59 Does Europe need its own AI models? 11:18 Is it a risk to only consume foreign models? 15:30 US innovates, Europe regulates? 19:13 How much does a smarter model matter? 23:12 Agentic systems and local data 26:56 Where should compute investment go? 31:28 Q&A: Are we in an AI bubble? 33:09 Q&A: AI replacing humans and the case for control 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

Philippe Schommers, Head of Infrastructure at Gnosis, explains how the Ethereum Economic Zone can enable synchronous composability between Ethereum and compatible chains. Today, users bridge assets, wait for finality, and manage separate transactions before interacting with another network. The proposed system coordinates blocks at matching timestamps and uses composers plus crosschain proxy contracts to recognize chain boundaries, execute calls across networks, and preserve atomic behavior even when Ethereum reorganizes or one leg of a transaction must be cancelled. He explains that synchrony requires more than a fast bridge. Participating chains must reference Ethereum consistently, coordinate execution at compatible timestamps, and reverse dependent actions when the L1 reorganizes. A composer determines when execution crosses a chain boundary, while proxy contracts represent remote calls and return values. Transactions are assembled into batches so each network can execute its portion without asking Ethereum to pause while another chain runs. Schommers describes capabilities already demonstrated on Gnosis Chain, including instant deposits and withdrawals, crosschain calls with return values, flash loans, and nested L1–L2 calls inside one transaction. The design could let an application source liquidity on another chain and return without a separate bridge flow, reducing fragmentation and improving user experience. He also addresses practical constraints: faster block times, heavy multichain simulation, validator requirements, proofs, reorgs, and missed bundles. The goal is a repeatable, fault-aware path that lets multiple chains behave like one economic environment while retaining diverse execution and proof systems. The implementation supports nested calls that can move from L1 to L2 and back several times while remaining one atomic transaction. This opens designs such as borrowing on one network, swapping against deeper liquidity on another, and returning the result without exposing the user to separate bridge steps. Schommers also distinguishes the specialized composer from ordinary validators because multichain simulation is computationally heavy. 00:00 Introduction to the Ethereum Economic Zone 00:48 Why Crosschain Bridging Is Cumbersome 01:10 One Atomic Crosschain Transaction 01:33 Swapping on L2 and Returning to Ethereum 01:56 Reorg Requirements for Synchronous Chains 02:18 A Communication Framework, Not a Stack 02:38 How the Multichain Composer Works 03:23 Simulating Transactions Across Chains 03:48 Matching Blocks and Chain Boundaries 04:10 Crosschain Proxy Contract Architecture 05:23 Returning Call Results to Ethereum 06:25 Posting Return Values Before Execution 06:54 Keeping Crosschain Calls Atomic 07:51 Live Deposits, Calls, and Flash Loans 08:20 From Devnet to Gnosis Chain 09:09 Accessing Ethereum L1 Liquidity 09:40 Remote Swaps Without Separate Bridging 10:06 Converting an Existing Live Network 10:28 Sequencing, Data Availability, and ZK 11:28 Decentralization Tradeoffs for Gnosis 11:52 Two-Second Block Time Goals 12:21 Validators and Reorg Constraints 13:29 Atomic Composability Across More Chains 14:04 Proof Diversity and Failure Modes 14:25 Devnet Roadmap and Gnosis Proposal 15:20 Invitation to Join the Open Protocol 15:52 Closing the Composability Talk _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Philippe Schommers X: https://x.com/filoozom ✅ Follow Gnosis X: https://x.com/gnosischain ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

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

Pedro Gomes

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Pedro Gomes, Founder of WalletConnect, argues that crypto has optimized transactions without fully solving payments. Blockchains can move assets, but a useful payment system must also coordinate authorization, clearing, settlement, merchant acceptance and the exchange of goods or services. He contrasts crypto’s common push-payment model with card and bank systems that pull funds after authorization, explaining why a simple wallet transfer leaves merchants and consumers to manage timing, token, chain, and counterparty complexity themselves. He breaks a payment into distinct stages that crypto applications often collapse into a single transaction. Authorization determines whether a buyer and merchant can complete the exchange, clearing reconciles obligations and handles rules, and settlement moves final value. Card networks and bank payments coordinate these stages before funds are pulled. A blockchain transfer usually pushes funds immediately, which creates problems when the merchant cannot accept the asset, the amount changes, the wrong chain is selected, or goods are delivered before payment is confirmed. Gomes outlines a WalletConnect approach that abstracts those choices behind one integration and a familiar payment request. A universal connection layer can route across wallets, stablecoins, tokens, and chains while supporting authorization before final settlement. For merchants, stablecoin payments can reduce chargeback abuse and integration overhead; for users, they can remove the need to install a special app or understand network mechanics. The larger goal is to move crypto beyond speculation and trading toward products people use because they offer faster, simpler, globally portable money, not because the payment happens on a blockchain. WalletConnect’s distribution gives it a foundation for a neutral payment layer because the same connection standard already reaches many wallets and applications. Gomes describes payment requests that can identify acceptable assets, route value, and abstract settlement without forcing merchants to integrate every token and chain. Stablecoins add global, programmable money, while the payment layer supplies the missing commercial workflow. 00:00 Introduction to WalletConnect Payments 00:25 From Wallet Transactions to Payments 01:14 Crypto Infrastructure and Money Movement 01:36 Bitcoin Started With Payments 01:57 Why Transactions Are Not Payments 02:49 Payments Coordinate Two Parties 03:12 Authorization, Clearing, and Settlement 03:32 Merchant Authorization and Compatibility 03:53 Clearing Rules and Risk Assessment 04:35 Settlement as the Final Stage 04:57 Why Settlement Can Arrive Later 05:18 How Payment Requests Work 05:41 Pull Payments Versus Push Payments 06:21 Preauthorization Reduces Payment Friction 06:49 Merchant Risk and Escrow Problems 07:37 Stablecoins and Merchant Complexity 08:17 Merchants Want Their Local Currency 08:38 One Integration Across Tokens and Chains 09:00 WalletConnect Distribution and QR Codes 09:47 Lower Fees for Global Merchants 10:30 False Disputes and Merchant Losses 10:53 Use Any Wallet Without a New App 11:17 Pay With Preferred Tokens and Chains 11:59 Payments for Mainstream Adoption 12:18 Moving Beyond Trading and Speculation 13:08 SDKs for Wallets and Payment Companies 13:44 Closing the Payments Presentation _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *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 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/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Joao Alves, Co-Founder of Bleap, explains what it takes to build a retail bank onchain and why blockchain infrastructure can improve both product speed and global availability. He highlights permissionless deployment, global reach, direct settlement, and composability with existing DeFi building blocks. Compared with a traditional bank’s web of providers and proprietary APIs, an onchain product can combine wallets, swaps, yield, and payments more quickly, while still choosing carefully between custodial and unhosted architectures. Alves grounds the comparison in product decisions made while building Bleap. An unhosted wallet can reduce intermediary risk and connect to DeFi protocols directly, but the team still must solve account recovery, regulatory controls, card integration, fiat access, and support. Custodial systems can simplify some interactions while creating a different operational and trust model. He argues that builders should choose architecture based on the customer experience they want to deliver rather than treating custody as an ideological decision. Alves also examines the obstacles that determine whether these benefits reach everyday users. Fiat onramps, card top-up fees, fragmented liquidity, poor user experience, regulatory obligations, and thin markets for tokenized assets can erase the advantages of the underlying technology. He points to stablecoins and cross-border transfers as a strong near-term use case: payments that currently cost two to three percent and take a day can settle in seconds. The broader opportunity is to deliver familiar, low-friction banking products while letting users benefit from programmable assets and open financial infrastructure. He evaluates savings, payments, remittances, cards, and tokenized investments through a retail lens. Consumers will not accept paying two percent every time they add money, managing gas across several chains, or understanding bridges and chain mechanics. Stablecoins are valuable when the product hides those mechanics and delivers a clear improvement over existing services. Cross-border transfers between Portugal and Brazil illustrate the opportunity, while weekend pricing for tokenized stocks illustrates what still needs work. 00:00 Introduction to Retail Banking Onchain 00:28 Joao Alves and the Bleap Product 01:27 Global Expansion for Financial Apps 02:01 Noncustodial Deployment Advantages 02:23 Composability With DeFi Building Blocks 02:46 Open Finance Versus Vendor Contracts 03:16 Onchain Network Effects 04:03 Savings, Investing, and Payments Onchain 04:57 Custodial Versus Noncustodial Design 05:48 Regulatory Benefits of Unhosted Wallets 06:05 Efficient Settlement and Treasury Flows 06:28 Connecting Wallets to Swaps and Yield 06:42 Do Not Outsource Complexity to Users 07:05 Keys, Recovery, and Crypto Jargon 07:32 Hiding Chains, Gas, and Slippage 08:00 Account Abstraction and Paymasters 08:23 The Fiat Onramp Experience 08:41 Why Retail Users Reject Top-Up Fees 09:03 Bleap OTC and Stablecoin Conversion 09:23 Moving Beyond Tab-Based Wallet UX 10:10 Retail Banking Opportunities 10:33 DeFi Yield for Bank Deposits 11:17 Retail Demand for Better Savings Rates 12:03 Stablecoin Currency Coverage Gaps 12:41 The Instant Remittance Opportunity 13:09 Portugal and Brazil Transfer Costs 14:17 Tokenized Stocks and Global Markets 15:08 Licensing and Liquidity Barriers 15:50 Instant Merchant Payments 17:02 Blockchain Versus Card Networks 17:29 Closing Vision for Onchain Banking _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *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 Joao Alves X: https://x.com/JoaoAlvesDotETH ✅ Follow Bleap X: https://x.com/BleapApp ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

ETHGlobal · Sep 9, 2026

Marcelo Kunze, Co-founder of Frames, shares what the team learned from settling roughly 500,000 payments initiated by AI agents. He traces the product from an ETHGlobal finalist project through accelerators and a rebrand, describing an early prompt-based system that hid wallets, passphrases, and payment mechanics from users. Demand centered on paid data and API tools, such as social monitoring, lead enrichment, and brand intelligence, but rapid growth exposed a core problem: agents could discover many endpoints without knowing which tools were reliable or appropriate for a specific task. Kunze uses the Michelin Guide as an analogy for products that begin by helping a new market grow and later become valuable infrastructure in their own right. Frames followed a similar path. The early system made agent payments possible through a portable prompt, then the team observed what people actually purchased. Data services dominated, but manual endpoint selection and paid requests that sometimes returned empty results prevented agents from reliably completing larger workflows. Frames used its transaction history to train a model that understands endpoint quality and handles routing, execution, payment, and validation as one workflow. A reliability system ranks tools as transactions succeed or fail, allowing performance to improve with usage and creating data that general web search cannot reproduce. Kunze positions Frames F1 as infrastructure for work beyond the public web: models can ask for an outcome while the system chooses and pays the right service. The lesson from agentic commerce is that payment rails matter, but dependable discovery and verified execution are what turn a directory of tools into a useful market. The accumulated payment history became a proprietary training and evaluation set. Frames can see which tools were selected, whether they executed successfully, what result was returned, and how often an endpoint failed for a particular task. That evidence supports routing and validation decisions that a general model cannot infer from documentation or search results alone. Kunze presents the system as an adaptive market for machine services. 00:00 Introduction and Michelin Guide Analogy 00:48 Discovery and Trust for Agent Payments 01:34 MCPay Begins at ETHGlobal Prague 02:02 From Finalist to Accelerator Support 02:42 Building a Wallet for AI Agents 03:12 A Curated Registry of Paid Tools 03:48 Prompt-Based Wallet Abstraction 04:14 Lessons From Five Hundred Thousand Payments 04:52 Demand for Data and Enrichment APIs 05:20 The Endpoint Selection Problem 06:03 Paying for Empty API Results 06:36 Replacing the Guide With a Smart Engine 07:22 Building a Composite Model 08:29 Fine-Tuning on Transaction History 08:55 Routing, Execution, and Payment 09:20 Validating Results Before Charging 09:48 Tool Reliability From Success and Failure 10:20 Live Options Data Example 10:48 Frames F1 and Proprietary Data 11:14 Comparing Frames With General Models 11:48 Why Agents Choose Reliable Companies _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Angelo Min X: https://x.com/angelomint ✅ Follow Lighthouse X: https://x.com/LighthouseOne_ ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Kim Luu and Eric Tesenair from Dynamic set hackers up for the weekend, introducing the team, the product, the prize tracks, hacker resources, and a live demo of the newest product, Fireblocks Flow. Kim, who recently joined Dynamic and Fireblocks in developer relations, explains that Dynamic was acquired by Fireblocks last October, so building with Dynamic means building on infrastructure backed by Fireblocks, through which about 15% of all global crypto and stablecoin transactions are secured and moved, giving projects real security and trust from the start, with customers like Kraken and Flutterwave. At its core, Dynamic provides non-custodial wallet infrastructure that scales, handling login, wallets, signing, and on-chain UX so builders integrate once and go straight to building, covering over 100 chains and 800+ wallets across EVM and non-EVM chains like Solana, Bitcoin, Sui, and Flow. Kim points to dynamic.xyz/docs and a hacker cheat sheet as the home base, stressing the one-click MCP install that drops Dynamic's docs into AI assistants like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex so they write accurate code. She walks through around $10,000 in prizes across five tracks: best use of Flow ($3,000), best agent build, best on-chain app, best wallet glow up (the continuity track), and a best private nano payments app built jointly with Unlink and Arc using Circle. Eric then demos Fireblocks Flow, whose pitch is accept any crypto, settle in any stablecoin, with one SDK, using DeFi protocols (via LiFi under the hood) rather than acting as liquidity provider. He walks through three nearly identical flows: a merchant checkout (buying a 10-cent backstage pass, paying in ETH on Base settling to USDC), a deposit flow for apps like prediction markets or games, and a more complex withdrawal flow using Dynamic's embedded wallet product, connecting external wallets and exchanges like Kraken via native wallet providers. He shows both the SDK and API integration paths (create checkout, add transaction and buyer source with watchlist checks, get a quote, sign and broadcast, await settlement via webhooks), notes Flow supports most EVM chains plus Solana, Tron, and Bitcoin, and closes with Q&A on testnet limitations and building stablecoin-backed cards with providers like Rain. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Welcome to the Dynamic Workshop 00:39 The Plan for the Session 01:05 Meet the Dynamic Team 01:47 Acquired by Fireblocks 02:12 The Fintechs and Enterprises That Trust Dynamic 02:30 What Is Dynamic 02:42 Before and After Dynamic 03:07 Over 100 Chains and 800 Wallets 03:33 Your Home Base: The Docs and Cheat Sheet 03:54 Why to Install the MCP for Your Agent 04:22 The Prize Tracks and $10,000 in Prizes 04:47 Best Agent Build and On-Chain App 05:08 Best Wallet Glow Up and Nano Payments 05:38 What Fireblocks Flow Is 06:33 Handing Off to Eric for the Demo 06:40 Setting Up the Flow Demo 07:11 Why You Might Want to Use Your Meme Coins 07:33 The Three Flows Explained 08:49 The Checkout Flow 09:12 Connecting Wallets and Exchanges 10:04 How the Conversion Works Under the Hood 10:43 Integrating With the SDK 12:09 Integrating With the API 12:29 Webhooks and Out-of-the-Box Wallet Lists 12:48 The Deposit Flow 14:06 The Withdrawal Flow With Embedded Wallets 14:55 Why You Need an Embedded Wallet 15:35 Q&A: Which Chains Flow Supports 16:10 Q&A: Testing on Testnets 16:38 Q&A: Building Stablecoin-Backed Cards 18:44 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal New York 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal New York 2026, a 3-day hackathon held June 12-14 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, bringing together the most skilled web3 developers, designers and product builders from all around the globe for a weekend-long adventure to advance the Ethereum ecosystem! Watch the full ETHGlobal New York 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7MZ8T-ict6YshkFDw9WJCu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship?_ 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Aug 9, 2026

In this workshop at ETHGlobal New York 2026, Meghna Mehta and Andrew Warner from Privy present updated interfaces for modern money management and movement, plus the hackathon bounties. Meghna, a product manager who came from mining and years at Coinbase, and Andrew, a forward deployed engineer and former Privy customer who started in finance at BlackRock, introduce Privy as secure, scalable wallet infrastructure that lets you spin up embedded wallets in applications or server-side payments infrastructure. Privy has over 2,000 applications and 120 million users and processes around $15 billion a month in stablecoin and native currency transfers. They highlight three recently launched products: deposit addresses, Privy Earn, and an agent CLI. Andrew details the agent CLI and its skill, which gives Claude and Codex agents complete access to Privy's SDKs and APIs to fund wallets, send transactions, and sign messages while the developer stays in the loop controlling funding and access. Agents authenticate into an embedded wallet through a short-lived, per-transaction ephemeral signing key that can be revoked anytime, with policies to prevent malicious behavior or draining. Meghna covers deposit addresses (launched two weeks earlier): persistent per-user EVM addresses that let anyone send any asset on any chain, automatically bridging and swapping to a single canonical token on a canonical chain with no KYC or verification flows and broad asset support. She then covers Privy Earn, a simplified interface to leading on-chain yield providers like Morpho, letting you deposit, withdraw, and track balances via a single API call, with spending out of the balance coming later. She frames Privy as building financial infrastructure where wallets are just a starting point. In a long Q&A, they share exciting builders (Deel's stablecoin accounts paying contractors in Argentina with yield via a Morpho vault, and Ramp's business accounts), discuss potentially integrating ENS for easier send destinations, custom Earn partnerships, and the technical side of their roughly 20-millisecond server-side signing latency (down from 100), achieved by moving from client-side key reconstitution to a secure AWS Nitro Enclave with websocket infrastructure, parallelized pre-checks, and global regional coverage. They also explain Shamir secret sharing (splitting keys into shards reconstituted in memory then destroyed) and a bring-your-own-cloud option for institutional customers, and note Privy supports over 40 EVM and SVM chains. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Meet Meghna and Andrew 00:56 What Is Privy 01:15 Privy by the Numbers 01:37 The Three Newly Launched Products 01:57 Introducing Privy Earn 02:22 The Agent CLI 02:44 How Agent Wallets Work 03:23 Staying in the Loop With Policies 03:47 Ephemeral Per-Transaction Signing Keys 04:06 How the Skill File Empowers Agents 04:26 Deposit Addresses Explained 04:41 Persistent Per-User Addresses 05:02 Automated Bridging and Swapping 05:23 No KYC and Universal Asset Support 05:54 Embedded Yield With Privy Earn 06:17 A Simplified Interface to Yield Providers 06:37 Deposit, Withdraw, and Track Balances 06:54 Why Wallets Are Just the Starting Point 07:17 Q&A: The Most Exciting Projects 08:01 How Deel Powers Global Stablecoin Accounts 09:05 How Ramp Uses Privy for Businesses 09:32 Q&A: Integrating ENS 10:38 Q&A: Custom Earn Integrations 11:19 Q&A: What the 20ms Latency Means 12:00 Moving to Server-Side Signing 12:39 What the 20 Milliseconds Covers 13:23 How Websockets and Enclaves Cut Latency 14:03 Global Regional Coverage 14:23 Q&A: Shamir Secret Sharing 15:42 How Key Shards Are Reconstituted 16:06 Bring Your Own Cloud for Key Storage 16:28 Q&A: How Many Chains Are Supported 17:36 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 · Jul 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

Tim Beiko

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Tim Beiko, who spent eight years on Ethereum core protocol R&D coordinating major network upgrades like EIP-1559 and The Merge, presents his thesis on how Ethereum can evolve from being "unreasonably sufficient" to becoming "reasonably necessary" infrastructure for the world. He explains that the question keeping him up at night for years was whether Ethereum could scale to planetary infrastructure without compromising its core properties, and with zero knowledge proofs and data availability sampling now in production, that question has been answered. The harder question now is what Ethereum should actually be used for. Tim argues that for Ethereum to truly succeed, it must provide things the world genuinely needs that cannot be obtained elsewhere, and those things must depend on Ethereum's unique properties of permissionlessness, immutability, censorship resistance, and decentralization. He contrasts two possible outcomes: The Pirate Bay as a cautionary tale of useful technology that became niche versus TSMC as the level of strategic importance to aim for. He identifies three core affordances that Ethereum uniquely provides: durable commitments across jurisdictions and time, canonical uniqueness through globally consistent state, and programmable trust as a dial rather than binary gate. He uses flash loans as a proof point of financial primitives impossible elsewhere, and suggests prediction markets becoming composable risk infrastructure as one possible frontier. He closes by announcing his focus is shifting from protocol work to finding the applications that deserve to run on Ethereum at planetary scale. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Background and Ethereum's Special Properties 00:54 Unreasonable Sufficiency: Simple Protocols, Complex Results 01:19 The New Question: What Should Ethereum Be Used For 02:24 Why Ethereum Must Provide What the World Needs 03:28 Cautionary Tale: The Pirate Bay vs Strategic Goal: TSMC 04:34 Why Apps Must Depend on Ethereum, Not Just Run on It 05:33 Why DeFi and L2s Are Foundations, Not Final Answers 06:55 The Bar for Reasonably Necessary Territory 07:49 Three Core Affordances Ethereum Uniquely Provides 08:32 Durable Commitments Across Time and Context 09:13 Canonical Uniqueness and Double Spend Prevention 10:04 Programmable Trust as a Dial, Not a Binary Gate 10:54 Settlement Physics and Flash Loans as Proof 12:18 Prediction Markets as Composable Risk Infrastructure 13:18 AI Agents and Onchain Trust at Machine Speed 13:52 The Foundation Is Already in Place 14:31 Tim's Next Chapter: From Protocol to Applications 15:08 Closing: Becoming Reasonably Necessary _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Stani Kulechov

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Meredith Pitkoff, CEO of Stork, walks through the explosive growth of RWA perpetual futures markets and explains what traders are actually buying when they trade commodity, equity, or pre IPO perps. Stork builds oracle infrastructure that powers more than half the volume in onchain perpetuals trading. She traces three waves of RWA perps growth in 2026. First, oil and commodities: WTI oil perps went from $76 million in January volume to $488 million in February, then $21.5 billion in March after war broke out in the Middle East on a Saturday and weekend events kept hitting, then $60.2 billion in April. Second, indexes: TradeXYZ on Hyperliquid built proxy indexes and secured a licensing deal with S&P Dow Jones for an officially sanctioned S&P 500 perp. Third, equities: AI adjacent names like Micron, SanDisk, and Nvidia drove equity perps volume from $25.6 billion to $62.8 billion in May alone, with listings nearly doubling from 196 to 391. There are now 569 different RWA perp markets across roughly a dozen tracked exchanges, and on May 29th the CFTC approved Bitcoin perpetuals for Kalshi, authorized Coinbase to serve foreign derivatives markets, and issued an advisory on 24/7 trading. Meredith digs into the mechanics. For commodities and indexes, traders are usually trading a proxy because CME and S&P Dow Jones data is expensive and not licensed broadly, so exchanges pull from secondary sources or construct their own facsimile indexes. Stork is tracking four NASDAQ 100 proxy perps and seven S&P 500 proxy perps, each printing slightly different prices. Perps are quoted in stablecoins which introduces basis risk and implicit currency exposure on foreign equities. When TradFi markets close on Friday at 4 PM Central, perp exchanges switch to internal oracles using impact prices, exponential moving averages, and hard caps, and TradeXYZ's WTI market moved with directional accuracy toward the CME Sunday open 90.5% of the time across 19 of 21 weekends in 2026. She covers pre IPO perps with both wins (Cerebras' perp predicted the IPO opening minute within 0.5%) and losses (Quantinuum's frothy perp price was double the actual opening). She closes by identifying the real barrier to the next volume unlock: professional traders wind down positions Fridays because they cannot hedge weekend RWA perps without liquid spot markets, leaving the market retail dominated and thin. 00:00 Introduction 00:35 Stork's Three Products and Today's Coverage 01:05 The RWA Perps Growth Story Begins 01:28 Oil Perps Explode After Middle East Events 02:09 The Index Wave and TradeXYZ's S&P 500 License 02:25 The Equity Wave Driven by the AI Trade 03:10 569 RWA Perp Markets Across Top Exchanges 03:29 The CFTC Steps In on May 29 03:55 What You're Actually Trading: Proxies 04:23 Multiple Index Proxies Printing Different Prices 04:54 Basis Risk From Stablecoin Denomination 05:20 Implicit Currency Exposure on Foreign Equities 05:48 How a WTI Perp Prices on Saturday Afternoon 06:25 Internal Oracles, Impact Prices, and Hard Caps 06:55 90.5% Directional Accuracy Across Weekends 07:25 How Smaller Exchanges Inherit TradeXYZ Pricing 07:54 Pre IPO Perps: SpaceX, Cerebras, Quantinuum 07:54 Cerebras: The Perp Predicted the Opening Minute 08:46 Quantinuum: When Pre IPO Perps Got It Wrong 09:47 Thin Liquidity and Manipulation Risk 10:15 Pre IPO Price Discovery Is Remarkable, Not Guaranteed 10:44 Why Oracles Matter for Perps 11:08 Stork's Sub Millisecond Latency 11:36 Why RWA Pricing Is Harder Outside Market Hours 12:02 Blue Ocean ATS and Overnight Equity Sessions 12:28 The Real Barrier: Professional Traders Cannot Hedge 12:59 The Path Forward: Tokenized Stocks and Deeper Markets 13:26 Where Stork Is Focused _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *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, Paul Henry Kajfasz, founder and CEO of Unlink, makes the case that public blockchains have created better financial rails but cannot become the world's money without solving privacy. He frames the opportunity: onchain rails moved roughly $9 trillion in real volume last year (about 5x PayPal's volume), proving these are fundamentally better rails than traditional finance with instant settlement, near free transactions, 24/7 global availability, and full programmability, translating to millions in saved fees or new revenue for companies. Yet when he asks the room how many people use blockchain in their daily lives, only one or two hands go up, and worldwide penetration sits below 1%. Something is wrong. Paul argues the root cause is that we built better rails but did not build better money. For 5,000 years from cowrie shells to cash to bank transfers, money has been private by default with selective disclosure to your bank or the taxman. Public blockchains broke this fundamental model by making every transaction leak all information. With AI, an internet connection, and a few tokens, anyone can know everything about a company's flows in an afternoon. He illustrates with a CFO running payroll onchain (employees seeing each other's salaries makes raises politically impossible), public treasuries, public B2B payments, and every trade being visible. He cites 72 physical attacks worldwide in 2025 including kidnappings and torture targeting people known to hold money onchain. He explains why privacy solutions have stayed niche: companies were forced to choose between non compliant cypherpunk mixers or new private L1s and L2s that break network effects, liquidity, and Lindy. The missing piece, and what Unlink is building, combines three things: privacy, compliance (AML, anti terrorism financing, KYC, KYB) as first class citizens, and integration through APIs, SDKs, and dashboards on the chains companies actually want to use like Ethereum and Solana. He closes by previewing partnerships with Monad, Euler, and others. 00:00 Introduction 00:08 Better Rails But Not Better Money 00:40 $9 Trillion Moved Onchain, 5x PayPal 01:22 Why Onchain Rails Are Fundamentally Better 02:27 Why Aren't Companies Rushing In 02:49 Show of Hands: Daily Blockchain Usage 03:34 Less Than 1% of Humanity Uses These Rails 04:11 The Missing Piece: Better Money 04:38 5,000 Years of Money Being Private by Default 05:05 How Public Blockchains Broke the Model 05:30 AI Makes Every Transaction Readable 06:18 The CFO Payroll Problem 07:13 72 Physical Attacks in 2025 07:57 Why Adoption Stalls 08:25 What Companies Actually Need 09:04 Why Privacy Stayed Niche 09:26 The Rock and Hard Place: Mixers vs New Chains 10:12 Losing Network Effects and Lindy 10:37 The Three Missing Pieces 10:59 Compliance as a First Class Citizen 11:24 Integrating with the Chains Companies Already Want 11:50 Unlink and the Vision Ahead 12:18 Closing: Bringing Trillions Onchain _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Haseeb Qureshi from Dragonfly sits down with Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer of Coinbase, who oversees strategy, operations, commercial deals, and investor relations, and started Coinbase Ventures in 2018. Shan explains that Coinbase Ventures invests off Coinbase's balance sheet without outside LPs, giving it flexibility to take 20 year horizons, flex across any stage or sector, and serve as a conduit to the rest of Coinbase for partnerships and eventual M&A. On conflicts of interest, he says information is firewalled within the Ventures team and no investment is tied to a listing. Referencing the crypto VC apocalypse and Jensen Huang's Anthropic regret, he notes that with late stage capital scarce, Coinbase can extend its balance sheet to support Series B through D companies. On Hyperliquid, Shan argues nearly every crypto company views Coinbase as a competitor, but Hyperliquid's self custodial traders differ from Coinbase's regulated customers, and Coinbase also runs infrastructure where partnering makes sense. On M&A, with over 40 acquisitions done, he says success comes down to integration: a consistent champion, a clear operational thesis, and cultural fit (joking that being on Teams is a red flag). He names Tagomi (2020) as his masterpiece, which became the foundation of Coinbase Prime just as corporate Bitcoin treasury demand exploded. As head of IR, he says institutions see Coinbase as the mature, compliant, diversified scale player, with roughly 50% of revenue from non-trading fees and agentic payments like X2X viewed as call options. On Base's missing token, he says decentralization will happen but a public company token is a one way door. He addresses the vibe shift against decentralization, favoring progressive decentralization that preserves execution speed. He places Clarity Act odds at 60 to 70%, notes Coinbase already operates compliantly without legislation, and closes by pitching Coinbase as full stack financial infrastructure for a tokenized future, citing strong fundamentals in stablecoins, RWAs, and payments uncorrelated with crypto prices. 00:00 Introduction 00:07 What a Chief Business Officer Does 00:48 Coinbase Ventures and Investing Without LPs 01:27 What Coinbase Can Do That Traditional VCs Cannot 02:35 Coinbase Ventures as a Conduit to Coinbase 02:55 How Coinbase Thinks About Conflicts of Interest 03:47 Information Firewalls Within Ventures 04:28 The Jensen Huang and Anthropic Story 04:49 The Crypto VC Apocalypse 05:44 Coinbase Writing Bigger Checks Than Others 06:05 The 2018 Origins of Coinbase Ventures 06:35 Filling the Late Stage Capital Gap 07:11 The Hyperliquid Relationship 07:42 Why Nearly Everyone Competes With Coinbase 08:37 Different Customer Segments and Infrastructure 09:24 The M&A Track Record: Over 40 Acquisitions 10:04 Why Integration Determines Success 10:20 Having a Consistent Champion for the Deal 11:02 A Clear Thesis and Operational Plan 11:43 Assessing Team and Cultural Fit 11:58 Why Being on Teams Is a Red Flag 12:34 The Tagomi Masterpiece Deal 13:36 Impeccable Timing and the Bitcoin Treasury Wave 14:19 The Foundation of Coinbase Prime 14:34 Becoming the Everything Exchange 14:55 What Institutional Investors See in Coinbase 15:41 Diversifying Beyond Volatile Trading Revenue 16:21 Agentic Payments and X2X as Call Options 16:53 Base and the Missing Token Question 17:39 Why a Public Company Token Is a One Way Door 18:20 The Vibe Shift Against Decentralization 19:21 The Downsides and Trade-offs of Decentralization 19:56 Why Users Choose Great Products 20:14 Progressive Decentralization as the Path 20:51 Positioning for a Possible Regulatory Reversal 21:38 Why Coinbase Is Optimistic on Clarity 21:58 Placing the Odds at 60 to 70% 22:31 How Coinbase Operates Without Legislation 23:13 The Malaise in Crypto and Why Buy Coinbase 23:40 Full Stack Financial Infrastructure for the Future 24:17 Why Strong Fundamentals Outlast Price Swings 24:52 Payments Uncorrelated With Crypto Prices 25:12 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Steven Goldfeder

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

Sam Kazemian

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Spencer Noon from OurNetwork sits down with Sam Kazemian, founder of Frax, to discuss how a stablecoin becomes core infrastructure in the post Genius Act world. Sam winds back to March 2025 when he, co-founder Travis Moore, and US industry figures including the Blockchain Association and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong were negotiating the wording of the Genius Act, which legalized payment stablecoins as federally regulated digital dollars. He breaks down what he sees as the most important part of the act: a stablecoin issuer backed by narrow collateral types (Fed reverse repos, money market fund securities, Treasury bills, and FDIC insured bank deposits, or RWAs representing those) can become a Genius compliant issuer through the OCC or a state regulator, issuing what amounts to legal tender that banks, companies, and fintechs can accept. He explains that while Frax was an Ethereum DeFi OG with an original hybrid algorithmic stablecoin (now deprecated but not shut down, like DAI and Sky), the flagship product is now FraxUSD, a Genius compliant stablecoin that launched right when the act passed in July 2025. Sam details FraxUSD's core differentiator: unlike USDC or USDT where users and venues have no relationship with the issuer and receive none of the underlying risk free yield, FraxUSD streams the risk free rate directly on chain. He walks through the concrete mechanism built with Aave V4, where a reserve link smart contract checks the average FraxUSD balance in partner protocols like Aave and Curve pools daily, mints new FraxUSD against the growing reserves, and streams it into those venues, making FraxUSD the highest TVL lent digital dollar on Aave V4. Users can view the underlying RWAs (money market fund securities and Treasury bills custodied by BlackRock, BNY, and WisdomTree). Sam frames base money stablecoins as the biggest network effect product in crypto, distinct from yield bearing 4626 vaults, and explains Frax's forward looking strategy of not fighting USDC on established venues but instead becoming the aligned default digital dollar for the infrastructure of tomorrow like Aave V4, Morpho, and new RWA pools. Spencer connects this to DeFi's promise of financial empowerment and Vitalik's critique of unnecessary rent seeking, noting the current disconnect between $300 billion in stablecoins and only $16 billion on lending protocols. Sam closes with a prediction that the stablecoin supply will double from $300 billion to over $600 billion within a year, with banks moving balance sheets into compliant stablecoins and companies running stablecoin treasuries becoming routine daily headlines. 00:00 Introduction 00:07 Winding Back to March 2025 and the Genius Act 00:51 What the Genius Act Legalized 01:17 Deconstructing the Parts That Matter 01:51 The Narrow Collateral Requirements 02:25 Why Frax Built the New Version This Way 02:58 From Algorithmic Stablecoin to FraxUSD 03:48 Being First to Build to the Act 04:31 The User Journey vs a Neo Bank or Coinbase 05:03 Why Most Venues Get No Yield From Issuers 05:32 The Aave V4 Risk Free Rate Mechanism 05:58 Highest TVL Digital Dollar on Aave V4 06:24 Looking Forward, Not Winding Back the Clock 06:58 The Aligned, Regulated, Redeemable Digital Dollar 07:32 Why the Current Lending Rate Falls Short 08:38 Viewing the Underlying RWAs on Frax's Website 09:08 Which Institutions Custody the Reserves 09:37 How the Reserve Link Smart Contract Works 09:59 A Programmable Version of Coinbase USDC Earn 10:33 Why Base Money Is the Biggest Network Effect 11:32 Network Effects vs Yield Bearing Vaults 12:06 FraxUSD as Direct Spend Across Venues 12:34 DeFi as Financial Empowerment 13:10 The $300 Billion vs $16 Billion Gap 13:39 Efficiency, Alignment, and Composability 14:04 Sustainable Infrastructure, Not a Campaign 14:37 Not Fighting USDC on Established Pairs 15:03 Targeting the Infrastructure of Tomorrow 15:37 The Two Year Vision for FraxUSD Dominance 16:32 What KPIs Frax Aligns Around 16:53 Why Eventually There Will Just Be Dollars 17:59 Banks and Companies Moving to Stablecoin Treasuries 18:51 When Billion Dollar Mints Become Daily Headlines 19:07 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Yuga Cohler, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform, sits down with Erik Repp, founder of the X2X protocol and his former boss, to discuss the state of agentic payments. Yuga frames agentic payments as a buzzword that Coinbase thinks about constantly, and after polling the audience finds most have heard of X2X but far fewer have actually done a transaction or had an agent do one. Erik's core takeaway is that agentic commerce is not theoretical: it already happens tens or hundreds of thousands of times a day and is genuinely useful right now, urging everyone to give their agent a wallet and five dollars and try it. With Anthropic's Fable launching that day and models accelerating, they note agentic payments are still nascent at roughly $15 million annualized volume, while X2X recently hit its 100 millionth transaction and around 50 million annualized. Erik explains that the original sin of the internet was having no standard way to declare a payment regardless of the underlying rails, since Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com all differ. X2X provides a well typed schema and standard way of declaring how to receive payment, which creates easy programmable interfaces for agents. Because agents are probabilistic and every credit card form field is another chance to fail, deterministic programmatic tools let an agent simply express intent to pay rather than filling 14 fields. X2X is agnostic to the underlying rail, operating across roughly 15 blockchains including Solana, Base, and Ethereum, plus card rails. They discuss why stablecoins fit agentic payments (microtransactions charging fractions of a cent, programmability, instant settlement), and Yuga positions CDP as Coinbase's version of AWS providing settlement, custody, API and MCP infrastructure, and enterprise controls, where enabling agent payments is just a config on an existing stack. Erik draws an analogy to the open web built on HTML and HTTP, arguing crypto's open standards let companies compete on a level playing field while handling custody, KYC, and compliance. They close with hot takes: Yuga predicts 2026 as the year of agentic "vibe trading" where agents pay for data autonomously via X2X, and Erik argues payments make AI less mundane by giving agents access to valuable proprietary information rather than the same public corpus everyone else has. 00:00 Introduction 00:31 Agentic Payments and the X2X OG 00:52 Audience Poll: Who Has Done an X2X Transaction 01:20 Go Try Agentic Commerce Yourself 01:48 Volume Stats and Anthropic Fable Launch 02:30 Why AI Agents Need to Make Payments 02:36 The Original Sin of Internet Payments 03:22 How X2X Standardizes Payment Declaration 03:46 Why Agents Need Deterministic Tools 04:44 X2X Across 15 Blockchains and Card Rails 05:04 Why Stablecoins for Agentic Payments 05:42 CDP as Coinbase's Version of AWS 06:19 The Infrastructure Stack: Settlement to Custody 07:22 The Edge Determines Human, Agent, or Business 07:46 Shopify and Merchant Acceptance Examples 08:11 Agentic Payments as a Config on Existing Infrastructure 08:32 The Pivot to Agents Like the Open Web 09:30 Why Businesses Need Custody and Compliance 09:53 Competing on a Level Playing Field 10:23 AWS Agent Core Adopts X2X 10:43 Marketing and Research Agents Using X2X 11:57 The Number One Enterprise Question: Compliance 12:27 How the Facilitator Lowers the Barrier 13:20 CDP's Facilitator With KYT and OFAC Screening 13:53 Safe Defaults That Drop Barriers to Entry 14:25 Why Conservative Enterprises Are Coming Around 14:59 The Magic Moment for Agentic Payments 15:21 Hot Take: 2026 as the Year of Vibe Trading 15:50 Agents Trading Autonomously via X2X 16:30 Why Delegating to Trading Agents Is Fun 16:57 Hot Take: How Mundane AI Is Right Now 17:22 The Share Research Papers Era of AI 18:02 Why Capabilities Made the Internet Interesting 18:38 Why Payments Make AI Less Mundane 18:55 Giving Agents Access to Valuable Secrets 19:17 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, Jacob Willemsma from ETHGlobal sits down with Henri Stern, founder of Privy, to discuss Privy's first year inside Stripe and how stablecoin infrastructure is being woven into mainstream finance. Henri explains that Privy builds embedded wallets, key management systems that developers drop directly into their products to give users simple access to crypto, stablecoins, and any digital asset without needing to think about what happens under the hood. Privy serves several thousand customers ranging from crypto native companies like Jupiter, Hyperliquid, and Uniswap to much more mainstream businesses like Deel, Ramp, and Klarna. Henri shares that his biggest fear joining Stripe was the stack being co-opted and verticalized into captive infrastructure, but conversations with Stripe leadership affirmed a shared commitment to an open stack where developers pick their chains, orchestration, and rails, and where Privy can still serve Stripe, Bridge, and Tempo competitors. He describes the pragmatic balance between decentralization purism and usable infrastructure, citing wallet connectors and day one key export as escape hatches that preserve self custody. He walks through lessons absorbed from Stripe (decade long ambition exemplified by Atlas now powering 25% of Delaware incorporations, kinetic short term execution, and a deep commitment to never deprecating interfaces), the Treasury product giving businesses stablecoin backed accounts now used across 50 countries, and recent launches like MoneyGram's MGUSD and Deel's hold, earn, spend contractor wallets. He closes on the remaining bottlenecks of financial tooling, regulatory clarity, and accounting integration, along with his belief that these rails ultimately lay the groundwork for genuine self sovereignty. 00:00 Introduction 00:28 The Fear and Excitement of Joining Stripe 00:45 What Privy Builds: Embedded Wallets 01:04 From Crypto Native to Mainstream Customers 01:27 Privy Needs Friends: Why Wallets Need Ecosystems 02:11 The Fear of the Stack Being Co-Opted 02:33 Conversations With Stripe on an Open Stack 02:57 Working With Stripe, Bridge, and Tempo Competitors 03:37 Pragmatism Over Decentralization Maximalism 04:00 Where Are the Lines on Open vs Closed 04:40 Privy Earn Built on Morpho and Aave 04:57 Embedded Wallets and Abstraction From the Metal 06:06 Wallet Connectors and Escape Hatches 07:21 What Privy Learned Inside Stripe 07:40 Decade Long Ambition and the Atlas Example 08:40 Balancing Long Term Vision With Short Term Shipping 09:36 Never Deprecating Interfaces 09:50 Stripe Sessions and the Treasury Announcement 10:51 Why Crypto Rails Make Better Products 11:07 The Two Prongs of the Stablecoin Strategy 11:42 From Holding to Actually Using Stablecoins 12:30 Treasury Live in 50 Countries 13:00 Abstracting Crypto Without Losing the Magic 13:53 Smart Contract Risk and Disclosure 14:38 MoneyGram MGUSD and Deel Contractor Wallets 15:35 The Stablecoin Sandwich and Responsibility to Disclose 16:05 Ship the Value, Not the Infrastructure 16:48 Is Tooling Still the Bottleneck 17:30 Regulatory Clarity and Money 20/20 17:53 Accounting, Taxes, and Marrying the Rails 18:41 Meta Creator Payouts in Emerging Markets 19:33 The Perception Gap: Crypto Stuck in 2014 20:23 Three KPIs Henri Is Watching 21:21 New Experiences That Peek the Rails 21:39 The Ten Year Horizon of Self Sovereignty 22:04 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Shadman Sakib, founder of Flex Global, argues that fintech and banking have missed the real economy by building almost exclusively for customers who already have world class financial infrastructure. Through interactive audience polling, he illustrates that while most attendees use Robinhood and major banks, 99% of the world operates with a patchwork of obscure local banks, stablecoin wallets, FX platforms, manual checks, and separate debit cards just to complete a single transaction. Drawing on nine years at JP Morgan and City plus three years at Mercury, he explains that fintech was built in San Francisco for AI agents, NASDAQ listed companies, and large multi-million dollar deposit holders, while ignoring local manufacturers, middle market businesses, and exporters in places like Colombia hedging against currencies that fluctuate 20 to 30%. He notes even crypto foundations struggled to bank anywhere from 2020 to 2025, relying on patchwork setups across the Cayman Islands, BVI, Singapore, and Switzerland. Shadman contends that while stablecoins solved money movement, they don't solve operations for most companies, and 90% of stablecoin adoption happens overseas precisely where the complex use cases live. He details what's actually missing: invoices and ISO memos attached to payments, FX conversion to local currencies, local bank delivery, 30-day payment terms, and credit, which the US takes for granted but barely exists elsewhere. He critiques neo banks spinning up without true banking DNA or real compliance teams, chasing Solana treasuries and crypto companies with hundreds of millions rather than serving the businesses that drive the global economy. Using a Singapore tire manufacturer on HSBC as an example, he outlines the real needs: multicurrency accounts, multi-entity management, trade finance to borrow against receivables, local off-ramps, real credit, and compliance that understands industries rather than labeling crypto high risk. He explains Flex Global treats stablecoins not as a product to sell but as an augmentation of years of banking rails and credit expertise from servicing over 20,000 middle market customers, offering local currency accounts in 100 plus countries with invoicing, treasury, FX, and native credit. He closes urging the industry to stop building for people already on chain and instead serve those for whom simply holding US dollars is a luxury. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 Interactive Audience Poll 00:38 The One Transaction Nightmare 01:18 How Fintech Missed the Real Economy 01:47 Why the US Has World Class Infrastructure 02:12 How Things Break Outside the US 02:34 The Luxury of Using the US Dollar 03:02 Why Even Crypto Foundations Couldn't Bank 03:32 Who Fintech Has Been Building For 03:54 Building for Large Deposit Holders 04:18 The Neo Bank Cluster Chasing Crypto Treasuries 04:39 Why Regular Businesses Dwarf Crypto 05:02 Serving Crypto After SVB at Mercury 05:24 Why No Compliance Is a Death Sentence 05:45 How Banks Made Money on FX and Fees 06:10 Why the Fastest Money Movement Is Not Moving It 06:43 Why We Keep Building for the Same Customers 07:00 Why 90% of Stablecoin Adoption Is Overseas 07:35 What Is Missing From Stablecoin Payments 07:54 Why Credit Doesn't Exist Outside the US 08:42 Why Real Businesses Have Amplified Needs 09:09 Local Currency and Everyday Bills 09:45 The Singapore Manufacturer on HSBC 10:04 Trade Finance and Borrowing Against Receivables 10:22 Why Real Compliance Must Understand Industries 10:42 Why Neo Banks Lack Banking DNA 11:18 Why the Full Stack Is Hard to Build 11:44 Understanding Invoicing and User Permissioning 12:04 Why Business Payments Need Approval Layers 12:30 Serving the Customers Everyone Ignores 12:55 What Flex Global Is Building 13:25 Stablecoins as Augmentation, Not a Product 13:50 Serving the Customers Actually Moving Money 14:17 Local Accounts, Credit, and Native Rails 14:46 Talking to Design Partners 15:09 Building for People Who See This as Luxury 15:32 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHConf 2026* ETHConf is a 3 day event for founders, industry leaders, and builders who are excited about the possibilities of building on top of Ethereum. Connect with 2,000+ top innovators in crypto, finance, technology, and policy at our inaugural three-day event packed with showcases, demos, partnerships, and conversations shaping the future of the global economy. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow ETHConf* X: https://x.com/ethconf Website: https://ethconf.com _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎟️ Get your early bird tickets for ETHConf 2027: https://ethconf.com/2027#tickets 🎤 View the full ETHConf 2026 Speaker Schedule: https://ethconf.com/schedule _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

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

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Rodrigo Coelho, CEO of Edge & Node, explains why banks are racing onchain in 2026, covering what is working in production today and what is not, and what infrastructure moving production financial workloads on chain actually requires. He opens on how most of the world's money still moves on software written in the 1970s, likening institutions going on chain to a dial-up to broadband moment, or streaming music forced through record players. In 2026 the pilots of past years are moving into production: the New York Stock Exchange is working on 24/7 tokenized trading and tokenized assets are becoming collateral, all converging because the regulatory clock is ticking with the Genius Act, Clarity Act, and MiCA turning compliance frameworks from white papers into laws. Having spent eight years shipping blockchain infrastructure (from the first commit at The Graph to running Edge & Node, serving 1.8 trillion queries), Rodrigo says the Genius Act taking effect January 27th is a forcing function, and given long procurement cycles, institutions that wait for tooling will miss the window. Rodrigo argues banks are bringing the wrong assumptions on chain: their data stacks assume finality, append-only ledgers, overnight batch windows, and ACH and wire transfers, treating reorgs as edge cases when reorgs are normal, and off-the-shelf warehouses like Snowflake, Postgres, and BigQuery do not work out of the box with on-chain data, which is rarely cryptographically verifiable. Using the wrong tools breaks data freshness, auditability, and verifiability, and bad data puts capital at risk through stale collateral, blown liquidations, and compliance violations, with 24/7 markets that never pause. He lays out five non-negotiables for institutional data infrastructure: sub-second data freshness (block to query in under a second), verifiable cryptographic lineage, multi-chain access (The Graph indexes over 90 chains), on-prem deployment for data sovereignty in jurisdictions like the Middle East, Brazil, and Japan, and SQL-native querying that engineers and AI both speak. He gives vendor-evaluation questions and introduces Amp, Edge & Node's SQL-native, on-prem-capable blockchain data platform with verifiable extraction and full lineage across 100 chains that bridges into existing stacks. He shares production numbers (747 millisecond freshness, 100x pipeline improvement, 4,350x faster backfills), contrasts pay-per-query versus flat-fee licensing, and closes that the institutions moving now will own the next decade of financial infrastructure. 00:00 Introduction 00:41 Money Still Runs on 1970s Software 01:05 Why 2026 Is When Pilots Go to Production 01:35 Why the Regulatory Clock Is Ticking 01:57 Rodrigo's Background at The Graph 02:16 Why Now: Genius Act, MiCA, and Global Momentum 02:44 Why Waiting for Tooling Misses the Window 03:13 The Genius Act as a Forcing Function 03:42 What Institutional Conversations Revealed 04:11 Banks Bringing the Wrong Assumptions On Chain 04:34 Why Reorgs Break TradFi Assumptions 04:56 Why Off-the-Shelf Warehouses Fail 05:28 Why On-Chain Data Is Rarely Verifiable 05:40 The Three Things That Fail 06:01 Why Bad Data Puts Capital at Risk 06:33 Why 24/7 Markets Reward First Movers 06:56 The Five Non-Negotiables for Data 07:23 Multi-Chain Access and On-Prem Deployment 07:47 Why SQL Native Is a Requirement 08:07 Questions to Ask Every Vendor 08:30 Red Flags in Data Vendors 08:57 Introducing Amp 09:21 Joining On-Chain and Off-Chain Data 10:30 Amp's Production Numbers 11:00 Pay Per Query vs Licensing the Platform 11:50 How Compliance Becomes Provable 12:18 Why Amp Was Built for Tokenized Deposits 12:41 What Rodrigo Tells Every Institutional CTO 13:36 Why the Future of Finance Is Multi-Chain 14:13 Why Infrastructure Choices Decide the Leaders 14:39 The Rise of Heads of Digital Assets 15:02 Consulting to Navigate the Vendor Landscape 15:29 Building the New Way Money Moves 16:07 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this talk, Demetrios Skalkotos from Blockdaemon walks through what it takes to provide institutional ETH staking infrastructure for the traditional finance and institutional space. He argues the question is no longer whether to stake (that was settled 24 months ago) but who to trust and how to find a partner to scale with. He introduces Blockdaemon as an 8-year-old infrastructure company, an OG that started with dedicated nodes and an RPC API business, then grew into staking across 70+ chains and protocols, MPC wallet technology, and DeFi infrastructure, and now represents roughly 5% of the overall ETH staking market. He frames Ethereum as having crossed a major institutional adoption threshold: structurally different from Bitcoin, it builds an economy on yield and cash flow, producing a treasury asset for appreciation, not just price exposure. He cites over $500 million in ETF adoption, around 200 publicly traded DATs (36 Ethereum-focused, about 20% of the market) holding roughly 7 million staked ETH, and total staked assets approaching 40 million (about 32% of supply), all growing steadily even outside a bull market. Demetrios lays out the five categories institutions probe: security posture, compliance, liquidity, yield and slashing protection, and 24/7/365 operational service. On operator security, he stresses the operator should never touch or access private keys, which stay in a secure enclave, with policy-based access at the KMS layer and MPC ensuring no single operator holds signing authority, mirroring TradFi's evolution from dealer discretion to programmatic policy enforcement. He covers OFAC-compliant MEV-boost relay screening applied by default (not pushed onto clients), and certifications including ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, and SOC 1 Type 1. On liquidity, he counsels clients through entry and exit queues, recommending a 10 to 20% unstake buffer and partnering with prime brokerage and lending providers as a home-equity-line-style facility for unforeseen queue spikes. On yield, Blockdaemon contractually guarantees 100% slashing and double-signing insurance (not best efforts) and shows consistent outperformance of the average blended rate amid yield and MEV compression. He emphasizes the full-stack advantage of eliminating vendor fragmentation (every vendor seam is a compliance gap and attack surface) via a single provider, SLA, and master services agreement. He closes projecting staked ETH could approach 50% of supply within three years, with institutions the primary driver, and reiterates Blockdaemon's scale: over $10 billion staked under custody, 70+ chains, and 99.9% uptime. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Not Whether to Stake, but Who to Trust 00:43 Who Blockdaemon Is 01:24 Ethereum at an Institutional Crossroads 01:53 ETF Adoption and Publicly Traded DATs 02:25 How Much of the Supply DATs Represent 02:56 Structural Growth Beyond the Bull Market 03:20 The Opportunity in Continuous Growth 03:28 The Five Categories Institutions Probe 04:28 The Operator's Security Posture 04:51 Why the Operator Should Never Touch Keys 05:41 OFAC-Compliant Screening by Default 06:04 Certifications and Controls 06:55 Counseling Clients on Entry and Exit Queues 07:30 The 10 to 20% Unstake Buffer 07:44 Bringing In Prime Brokers and Lending 08:40 Protecting and Maximizing Production 08:50 100% Slashing and Double Signing Insurance 09:34 Consistent Performance Above Average 10:18 Why Yield Compression Raises the Stakes 10:50 The Full Stack Advantage 11:13 Why Vendor Fragmentation Is a Compliance Gap 11:39 Reducing Vendor Footprint for Institutions 12:04 The Value of a Single Provider Relationship 12:26 Where the Industry Is Heading 12:59 The ETF Flywheel in Motion 13:30 Projecting 50% of Supply Staked 13:52 ETH as a Dominant Institutional Asset 14:26 The Validator Economy and MEV Compression 14:53 Bringing It All Home 16:19 Blockdaemon's Scale and Track Record 16:50 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, Adam Wozney, senior director of global community at Circle, sits down with Sam Tabar, CEO of Bit Digital and White Fiber, to discuss the state of Ethereum, how TradFi is entering the space, and how physical infrastructure is evolving to power it all. An Oxford and Columbia law graduate and former attorney, Sam leads two publicly traded companies bridging the digital and physical worlds through Ethereum staking and AI high performance computing infrastructure. He opens by reflecting on following intuition over pure logic (a lesson from his tarot-reading mother and car-mechanic father), noting he was a poor lawyer before pivoting to finance. On Ethereum, Sam argues the money frame was always the wrong one. Bitcoin is the mother coin with first-mover advantage but is simply a store of value competing with the roughly $16 trillion gold market, while Ethereum is programmable money that competes with the entire financial system by removing middlemen and friction through smart contracts. He views ETH as a utility settlement layer and watches settlement and development activity as his key metrics, noting a favorable gap between strong fundamentals and current price. He predicts a generational shift as boomer decision-makers who resisted crypto give way to Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z who have normalized it, eventually making crypto a responsible part of family office portfolios and an inflation hedge superior to gold. He distinguishes Bit Digital as a strategic asset company rather than a digital asset treasury: rather than just shoving ETH on a shell balance sheet, Bit Digital sold all its Bitcoin to go all in on Ethereum, holds around 158,000 ETH which it stakes, owns 70% of NASDAQ-listed White Fiber (an AI data center company serving clients like Cerebras and Nscale with billion-dollar contracts), and lends against its ETH to finance White Fiber's buildout for alpha positioning. He frames AI as the third catalyst of the industrial revolution after electricity and the internet, describes the White Fiber IPO as the best day of his life, and closes predicting Wall Street has already chosen Ethereum as its programmable money horse though it is not yet priced in, plus a lightning round where he names government surveillance as his biggest AI fear. 00:00 Introduction 00:26 Setting the Stage: Finance, Networks, and Scale 00:48 Meet Sam Tabar 01:25 A Get to Know You Question 01:40 Growing Up With a Mechanic and a Tarot Reader 02:15 Logic vs Intuition in Leadership 03:03 Why Following Intuition Matters 03:31 Leaving Law to Follow Intuition 04:19 Why the Money Frame Is Wrong for Ethereum 04:57 Bitcoin as a Store of Value vs Gold 05:19 The Generational Shift in Portfolio Construction 06:08 Why Crypto Will Enter Family Offices 06:34 Ethereum as Programmable Money 06:58 Removing Middlemen and Friction 07:21 Ethereum as a Utility Settlement Layer 07:49 Conflating ETH Price and the Settlement Layer 08:10 Why Boomer Resistance Will Fade 08:48 From Bitcoin Mining to 158,000 Ethereum 09:29 Strategic Asset Company vs Digital Asset Treasury 10:08 Going All In on Ethereum 10:28 Taking Digital Tomatoes From Bitcoin Maxis 10:49 How the Strategic Asset Model Works 11:08 The ChatGPT Eureka Moment 11:50 Why AI Runs on Data Centers 12:23 Building Data Centers for Cerebras and Nscale 12:46 Why It Is Called White Fiber 13:12 How Bit Digital Owns 70% of White Fiber 13:43 Lending Against ETH to Finance Data Centers 14:05 Why This Is an Alpha Posture 14:19 What the NASDAQ Launch Day Was Like 14:49 Building Something That Outlasts You 15:04 Why He Would Not Recommend an IPO 15:32 Where Ethereum Goes Next Year 15:59 Why Wall Street Has Already Chosen Ethereum 16:23 Performing Regardless of ETH Direction 16:53 The Third Catalyst of the Industrial Revolution 17:24 The Lightning Round 17:36 Bitcoin or Ethereum 17:52 The Biggest Threat From AI 18:25 Secured or Unsecured Debt 18:32 Oxford or Columbia 19:47 Financial Data or Tarot Cards 20:00 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Jul 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Chris Perkins from 250 Digital Asset Management sits down with Maxime Seiler from STS Digital to unpack why crypto feels like such a strange market: record institutional excitement and progress like the Clarity Act, yet weak prices. Maxime explains that over the last two years a strong decoupling has taken place, where capital flows into infrastructure, M&A, and the rails that let institutions upgrade legacy settlement, trading, and clearing into 24/7 systems, rather than into tokens. Every major traditional institution now has a hands-on digital asset strategy building permissionless blockchain infrastructure, and he expects the token-level recoupling is only a matter of time. Chris likens it to the 2016-2017 era at Citi when the story was that the technology was amazing but the tokens were garbage. Maxime argues the missing piece is value accruing to token holders: many projects launched tokens and shipped products, but adoption flows diverged from investor flows, with steady supply pushing prices down. Without clarity on how residual business cash flows back to holders (the equity investor's basic dividend-yield question), capital has migrated out of crypto into AI stocks. On AI, he frames intelligence as having become a commodity deployed to build, while blockchain is the settlement rail and AI the intelligence layer, with recoupling coming when commoditized intelligence starts transacting value between agents on the new 24/7 infrastructure. As a leading options market maker across 400+ tokens, STS sees retail traders migrating to AI equities, a post-October slowdown, and participants now accepting a sideways rather than bull market, selling rallies and buying dips while institutions sell options for yield, compressing ranges in a self-reinforcing slow grind. He predicts the era of all boats rising is over, replaced by a token-picking era with more dispersion based on real adoption and TVL growth. He covers the two sides of structured products (institutions harvesting yield, and wealth managers building tailored products offering Bitcoin upside with limited downside), how binary options price similarly to prediction markets (where STS is active on crypto outcomes but not unhedgeable real-world ones), and closes that slow markets are for building and reward patient investors. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 A Weird Time for Crypto: Excitement vs Prices 00:30 What Is Going On With the Macro 01:32 The Decoupling Into Infrastructure and M&A 02:02 Why Capital Flows Into Building, Not Tokens 02:36 Are We in the Max Blockchain, Not Bitcoin Era 02:57 The 2016 Citi Story: Great Tech, Garbage Tokens 03:30 Is This the Endgame or a Cycle Back to Tokens 04:07 Why Product Flows Diverged From Investor Flows 04:54 Why Tokens Need Real Value Accrual 05:29 The Basic Dividend Yield Question 05:59 Why Capital Migrated to AI Stocks 06:21 Is AI Competing With Crypto for Capital 06:44 Why AI and Crypto Are Symbiotic Long Term 07:08 Intelligence as a Commodity 07:31 Blockchain as Rails, AI as the Intelligence Layer 08:30 When Agents Start Transacting Value 08:58 How AI Is Impacting the Market Maker Business 09:45 Retail Traders Migrating to AI Equities 10:10 The Post-October Mindset Shift 10:42 Why the Market Turned Range-Bound 11:26 How Selling Options Compresses the Range 11:52 Why Slow Markets Slow Markets Further 12:09 What Could Catalyze a Change 12:46 Why the All-Boats-Rise Era Is Over 13:15 The Coming Token-Picking Era 13:51 Why Fundamentals Will Find Value 14:44 Two Types of Structured Product Clients 15:29 Growth in Systematic Yield Strategies 15:56 Wealth Managers Building Tailored Exposure 16:27 Bitcoin Upside With Limited Downside 16:49 Integrating Prediction Markets 17:11 Why Options Add a Non-Binary Dimension 17:34 Why Binary Options Price Like Prediction Markets 17:57 Why Real-World Outcomes Are Not Hedgeable 18:28 How the Market Evolves Over 6 to 12 Months 19:01 Why Slow Markets Are for Building 19:55 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

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

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.

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.

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

45 million people depend on a network of internet freedom tools to access uncensored information. When the US government rescinded its funding mid-contract in 2025, most of those tools faced collapse overnight. Al, Director of Fundraising at the Tor Project, makes the case for why centralized funding is the Achilles heel of decentralized infrastructure. Tor's network is distributed by design — thousands of volunteer relay operators across the world, no single point of failure. But its funding came from one source. When that source changed its mind, the entire ecosystem was put at risk. His answer is to bring quadratic funding and community crowdfunding models from the Ethereum world into the internet freedom space. Tor is running a campaign in May 2026 using minimal anti-collusion infrastructure to make funding more equitable and resistant to manipulation — reaching 2.2 million Tor Browser users a day in the process. Speaker: Al Smith (Tor Project) 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.

Funding the Commons · May 9, 2026

On February 7th, 2026, NPR reported that the State Department was taking down its social media posts going back 20 years. The Internet Archive had already started archiving them. In the weeks that followed, the Wayback Machine captured more than 2 million posts and found that over a million had already been removed from the live web. This panel brings together Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, Megan Kleiman of the Filecoin Foundation, and moderator Wendy Hanamura to talk about what it means to preserve public data at a moment when governments are actively deleting their own records. The conversation covers Democracy's Library, a joint project storing government data from the US, Canada, Bermuda and beyond in decentralized Filecoin storage; why the Internet Archive's 200 petabytes of public data is one of the most important training sets AI has access to; and what builders can do with it right now. Mark also makes a case for archiving AI chatbot responses themselves — because if no one records what these systems are saying, that history disappears too. Speakers: Mark Graham (Internet Archive), Megan Kleiman (Filecoin Foundation) Moderator: Wendy Hanamura (DWeb / formerly Internet Archive) 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

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

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

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

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

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this opening introduction, Kartik Talwar, co-founder of ETH Global, welcomes over 500 attendees from 30 countries to Pragma Cannes 2026 — ETH Global's first Pragma conference of the year. He explains that Pragma is a one-day, single-track event designed to be non-technical and accessible, featuring executives discussing the future of Web3 over the next 6 to 18 months. The format ensures attendees never have to choose between overlapping sessions. Kartik previews the full 14-session agenda covering topics from quantum cryptography and institutional DeFi to agentic wallets, EU blockchain regulation, and AI-powered developer tools. Featured speakers include leaders from Ledger, Privy, Zirket, Chainlink, Aave, Gnosis, Oiler, Infura, and Celo. He also promotes ETHCom, ETH Global's upcoming large-scale conference in New York bringing together crypto-native and institutional finance, and shares a limited discount code for attendees. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 Welcome to Pragma Cannes 2026 00:35 What Is Pragma and Why It Exists 01:16 Event Format: One Day, One Track, Executive Speakers 02:05 14 Sessions: Interviews and Talks 02:23 Attendee Stats and Partners 03:04 ETHCom Preview: Biggest Ethereum Event in America 04:30 Full Day Agenda Walkthrough 07:07 Closing and Kickoff _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇫🇷 *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 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 talk, Debbie Soon, head of marketing at Privy, delivers a masterclass on technical storytelling — the skill of bridging the gap between how a product works and what it enables. She argues that complexity isn't the problem; the problem is when people don't understand what your product means for them. Using Privy's wallet infrastructure and policy engine as examples, she shows how the same product gets explained differently across five audience surfaces: socials (narrative layer), website (evaluation layer), docs (implementation layer), and trust center (risk/assurance layer). Debbie walks through two concrete translations: converting "hardware-isolated TEEs and key sharding" into "wallets that are secure by design but flexible in practice," and converting "boolean conditions with allow/deny actions" into "programmable behavior where money movement becomes safe, flexible, and predictable by design." She frames this as turning boolean logic into business logic. She closes with three daily principles for better storytelling: start with what changes (not what you built), translate systems into capabilities, and give people language they can repeat — because to make your product scale, you first have to be understood. 00:00 Introduction 00:42 What Is Privy and Why Storytelling Matters 02:30 The Problem: Complexity Isn't Bad, Misunderstanding Is 03:33 What Is Technical Storytelling 04:32 Bridging How It Works and What It Enables 05:22 Two Examples: Wallet Architecture and Policy Engine 06:15 Five Audience Surfaces: Socials, Website, Docs, Trust Center 07:30 Mapping Surfaces to Audiences 08:37 Example 1: Wallet Architecture — TEEs and Key Sharding 09:52 Translating Wallet Tech into "Secure by Design, Flexible in Practice" 11:18 Example 2: Policy Engine — Rules, Conditions, Actions 12:32 Translating Boolean Logic into Business Logic 13:43 Technical Storytelling Is Not Just for Marketers 14:28 Making Ideas Travel from Brain to Market 15:02 Three Principles: What Changes, Capabilities, Repeatable Language 16:41 To Scale, You First Have to Be Understood 17:20 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 Debbie Soon X: https://x.com/debsoon ✅ Follow Privy X: https://x.com/privy_io ✅ 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

Josef Je

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this talk, Josef Je introduces the European Ethereum Institute, a newly launched task force dedicated to getting Ethereum recognized as strategic public infrastructure by European regulators — comparable to the internet or the electric grid. He argues that after a decade of builders ignoring policy, regulation has now caught up to the point where DeFi, tokenization, and MEV are being discussed in EU papers, and the community must engage proactively or risk being overshadowed by permissioned chain salespeople pitching proprietary tech to uninformed regulators. Josef frames the urgency through Europe's risk of repeating the Web2 pattern where all innovation and business creation migrated to Silicon Valley while the EU could only react through after-the-fact regulation. He outlines the institute's three-pronged approach: producing evidence-based papers and infographics showing regulators the differences between true DeFi and centralized projects, helping regulators understand the full Ethereum technology stack beyond finance (identity, voting, ZK proofs, timestamping), and proactive outreach to bring regulators into crypto events. He announces that André Kvapiš, a former European Parliament member who helped remove DeFi from MiCA's scope, has officially joined the institute, and shares that initial funding comes from Ethereum Foundation, Aave, and Gnosis. 00:00 Introduction 00:29 Why a Builder Started Caring About Policy 02:09 Institutions Coming On-Chain: Now or Never 03:42 Launch of the European Ethereum Institute 04:22 Permissioned Chains Are Back (and Still Wrong) 05:10 Ethereum as the Golden Standard 06:05 "It's Ethereum, Not Blockchains" 07:00 Ethereum's Lindy and Network Effects 07:31 Mission: Ethereum as Strategic Public Infrastructure 08:55 Europe's Risk of Repeating the Web2 Mistake 10:14 Providing Evidence to Regulators 11:39 Tokenization, Stablecoins, and True DeFi 13:10 Ethereum's Stack Beyond Finance: Identity, Voting, ZK 14:22 A Task Force, Not Another Association 15:58 How a Regulator Joined the Ethereum Side 17:11 André Kvapiš and MiCA's DeFi Exemption 18:37 Team, Funding, and How to Get Involved 19:56 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 Josef Je X: https://x.com/josefje ✅ 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 talk, Adrienne Youngman, head of marketing and comms at Gnosis, presents the practical implications of the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ) and frames it within Gnosis's broader mission of restoring digital ownership. She traces how Web3's original promise of self-custody and permissionless systems has been eroded by L2 fragmentation, custodial super apps, and permissioned infrastructure — and argues that EEZ can "unfork" Ethereum by enabling cross-chain calls within a single transaction, unified liquidity pools, and global collateral visibility. Adrienne gives concrete UX improvements: eliminating bridging friction, enabling CowSwap to route trades across all chains as one pool, letting Aave see collateral across multiple chains, and allowing Safe configurations to reflect everywhere from a single change. She highlights new capabilities like private identity verification across chains without data leaving private domains, and institutional use cases where private blockchains interact with the Ethereum ecosystem. She closes by showcasing Gnosis's product suite — Gnosis Pay for self-custodial fintech infrastructure, their consumer app with Visa card and IBAN integration, and the Circles protocol for fair-distribution peer-to-peer money based on trust graphs and social consensus. 00:00 Introduction 00:38 Gnosis: More Than Safe 01:23 Gnosis's Building Legacy: AMMs, Prediction Markets, Cow Protocol 02:21 Gnosis Pay, Consumer App, VPN, and EEZ 02:46 GM The Man, We're Forking You 03:06 Ownership and Power: Why It Matters 04:30 Ownership Through Cultural and Class Lenses 05:17 Losing Ownership in Digital Lives 06:37 Web3's Original Promise and How We Broke It 07:43 L2 Fragmentation and Custodial Drift 08:13 EEZ in Practice: No More Bridging 08:41 Unified Liquidity Pools Across Chains 09:08 Composable Finance: Stake, Borrow, Use in One Transaction 09:32 Global Collateral and Safe Configuration Sync 10:25 New Possibilities: Private Identity Across Chains 11:25 Institutional Use Cases with Private Blockchains 11:57 CTA: Join the EEZ Alliance 12:20 Gnosis Pay: Self-Custodial Fintech Infrastructure 13:19 Circles Protocol: Fair-Distribution Peer-to-Peer Money 14:51 Closing: Bank on Gnosis _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇫🇷 *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 Gnosis X: https://x.com/gnosischain ✅ 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 talk, Misha Putiatin, co-founder of Symbiotic, lays out the four critical problems that must be solved to bring trillions of dollars of traditional finance on-chain in a composable, DeFi-native way rather than as simple database receipts. He argues that after 18 years of building infrastructure, blockchains are no longer bandwidth-bound, but the industry lacks the financial primitives needed for institutional adoption: private credit, smart contract risk coverage, standardized reporting, and RWA liquidity. Misha details Symbiotic's role as a collateral market platform addressing each problem: partnering with Cap Protocol for private credit and financial guarantees (already at $220M+ in delegations), working with Nexus Mutual on second-loss coverage for DeFi and RWA protocols, helping Hive build on-chain reporting with real-time liquidation triggers and automated audits, and building an instant liquidity solution that pools redemption flow across all tokenized platforms to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of illiquid RWAs with 90-100 day redemption windows. He emphasizes that the "native way" — composable, liquidatable, self-custodied assets with DeFi rails — is the only path that truly leverages what crypto has built, with instant liquidity and Nexus coverage both launching early Q2. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 18 Years of Building Infrastructure 02:26 Traditional Finance Is Finally Interested 03:43 Why Institutions Matter: They Have the Money 04:44 Two Options: Database Receipts vs DeFi-Native Composability 06:30 Symbiotic's Four-Problem Framework 06:59 Problem 1: Private Credit and Financial Guarantees 08:48 Problem 2: Smart Contract Risk Coverage with Nexus Mutual 10:42 Capital Efficiency and the Insurance Gap 12:12 Problem 3: Standardized On-Chain Reporting with Hive 13:22 Actionable Reporting: Liquidation Triggers and Automated Audits 14:03 Problem 4: RWA Liquidity — The Biggest Blocker 15:37 Current Solutions: Half-Yield Buffers and Platform Funds 17:00 Symbiotic's Approach: Pooled Cross-Platform Liquidity 18:01 Launch Timeline: Instant Liquidity and Nexus in Q2 18:41 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 Misha Putiatin X: https://x.com/Psalom ✅ Follow Symbiotic X: https://x.com/Symbioticfi ✅ 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

E.G. Galano

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this talk, E.G. Galano, co-founder of Infura, draws parallels between the evolution of blockchain infrastructure and today's AI infrastructure to share lessons on product differentiation in the agentic era. He traces Infura's journey from being the first Ethereum RPC gateway in 2016, through scaling challenges during CryptoKitties and DeFi Summer, to eventually losing market share as infrastructure commoditized — and how they responded by moving up the stack into multi-chain support, NFT APIs, and higher-margin indexing services. E.G. argues that AI inference is following the same pattern: starting as base-layer access, adding abstractions, then requiring coordination and outcomes layers. He shares his personal "E-Stack" project — a multi-agent system mirroring Infura's org chart with agents for protocol upgrades, SRE, support, product management, and even a crypto Twitter lurker for incident detection. He then presents Infura's marketplace vision where anyone can permissionlessly serve RPC traffic with staked SLAs and verifiable reputation scores, and explains how this model extends to AI skill and API marketplaces — solving the problem of data-driven, verifiable tool selection for agents that currently rely on Reddit sentiment rather than actual performance metrics. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 Inference Is the New Infrastructure 01:37 Parallels Between Ethereum and AI Infrastructure Cycles 03:09 Abstractions: From RPC to Specialized AI Models 03:53 Scaling Challenges and Battle-Testing 04:40 What Is Infura and Its Core Value Proposition 05:58 CryptoKitties, ICOs, and DeFi Summer Scaling 07:19 Self-Hosting vs Managed Services: The Recurring Debate 08:18 Declining Market Share Despite Growing Users 09:52 Differentiating When Infrastructure Commoditizes 10:25 Going Multi-Chain as Costs Decreased 11:27 AI's Next Layer: Outcomes and Agent Coordination 12:49 The E-Stack: A Multi-Agent Infura Org Chart 15:05 Building Moats: Network Effects Over Code 16:41 Infura's Marketplace: Permissionless RPC Providers 17:29 Agent Discovery, Payments, and Reputation 18:28 Verifiable Performance Scoring for Marketplaces 19:12 Extending to AI Skill and API Marketplaces 20:02 Data-Driven Decisions for Vibe-Coded Production Apps 21:04 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 E.G. Galano X: https://x.com/egalano ✅ Follow Infura X: https://x.com/infura_io ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar interviews Andrej Bencic, founder of Tenderly, about the evolution of Ethereum developer tools over the past eight years and how AI is reshaping smart contract development. Andrej describes how the multi-chain world has fundamentally changed development — teams now need to test across multiple forked mainnets with bridges, manage indexing across chains, and handle inconsistencies when chains go down. He contrasts today's production-grade stack (Foundry, account abstraction, staging environments) with the 2018 era of Truffle and Ganache. The conversation explores three distinct developer personas Tenderly serves: newcomers focused on smart contract integration and DeFi composability, OG teams like Aave pushing protocol frontiers, and institutional players held back by risk aversion. Andrej details how Tenderly's simulation technology helps manage operational risk post-deployment — from transaction simulation in Gnosis Safe to treasury management. He highlights their MCP integration that gives AI agents a sandboxed fork of mainnet to debug transactions (processing 50MB of data per transaction) and test workflows in a parallel universe before committing to production, calling it a critical safety net against the inevitability of AI-driven development. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 What Is Tenderly and Eight Years of Developer Tooling 01:43 How Multi-Chain Development Has Changed Everything 04:09 Cross-Chain Testing: Forking Multiple Mainnets 05:08 The Modern Developer Stack vs 2018 06:45 Production-Grade Development: CI/CD and Staging 08:17 AI Skills and Delegating Ethereum Context 09:04 Three Developer Personas: Newcomers, OGs, and Institutions 11:36 Institutional Risk Aversion as the Main Bottleneck 12:40 Managing Operational Risk Post-Deployment 14:16 Transaction Simulation and Avoiding Blind Signing 15:12 AI Agents and Smart Contract Development 16:02 Sandboxed Fork Environments for AI Workflows 17:33 Tenderly's MCP: Debugging and Testing for AI 18:40 AI Processes 50MB of Transaction Data Better Than Humans 19:22 Advice for New Smart Contract Developers 21:25 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 Andrej Bencic X: https://x.com/bendzi ✅ Follow Tenderly X: https://x.com/TenderlyApp ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar, Jordi Baylina

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar interviews Jordi Baylina from the Gnosis team about the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), a new protocol for synchronous cross-chain communication between Ethereum rollups. Jordi explains that EEZ enables smart contracts on different chains to call each other as if they were on the same chain — not just token transfers but any arbitrary contract call including voting, NFT operations, and more. This is made possible by breakthroughs in real-time ZK proving, where a full Ethereum block can now be proved with just 12 GPUs, down from 128 six months prior. Jordi walks through the technical architecture: when a cross-chain call happens, an execution table is stored on L1, zero-knowledge proved, and resolved within Ethereum's 12-second block time. Transactions between L2s are effectively free, limited only by GPU hardware. EEZ is permissionless — anyone can create a rollup, even non-EVM chains, as long as they support the call interface. Built by a nonprofit association with no token and no monetization, the project currently has a working internal DevNet with plans to open it publicly soon. Jordi flags block builder centralization as his primary concern, noting that validators must choose responsibly to preserve Ethereum's decentralization values. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 Welcome and What Is the Ethereum Economic Zone 01:12 Synchronous Cross-Chain Calls: The Core Idea 02:04 What Changed: Real-Time ZK Proving Breakthroughs 03:16 From 128 GPUs to 12: Engineering Progress 04:39 Two Years of Latency Reduction Work 06:14 How EEZ Differs from Bridges and Other Solutions 07:14 Nonprofit Structure: No Token, No Monetization 08:20 Connecting L1 to L2 and L2 to L2 09:25 Any Call Data Works: Not Just Token Transfers 09:59 Permissionless Rollup Creation and Non-EVM Support 11:45 How Real-Time Proving Works in Practice 14:39 Scaling: One Proof for All Instructions 15:37 Free Transactions Between L2s 16:38 Does EEZ Help or Fragment Ethereum 18:06 Concerns: Block Builder Centralization 19:35 Validator Responsibility and Decentralization 21:02 Project Status: DevNet Live, Public Access Soon 22:16 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 Jordi Baylina X: https://x.com/jbaylina ✅ Follow ZisK X: https://x.com/ziskvm ✅ Follow Kartik Talwar X: https://x.com/TheRealKartik ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · May 9, 2026

In this fireside chat, Kartik Talwar interviews Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer of Chainlink, about Chainlink's evolution from a data oracle provider to a comprehensive infrastructure platform for institutional DeFi. Johann recounts joining the space in 2016-17, realizing the biggest gap was connecting real-world data to Ethereum, and living through DeFi Summer 2020 when Chainlink scaled from 20 oracle networks to over 1,000 price feeds — at one point representing 50% of all Ethereum transaction fees to keep DeFi protocols solvent during extreme congestion. The conversation explores how DeFi use cases built in 2020 (derivatives, prediction markets, tokenized equities) are only now reaching mass adoption as the world catches up. Johann details Chainlink's expansion into cross-chain infrastructure, on-chain compliance (automated KYC bridging with partners like DTCC and Apex), and opt-in privacy through their runtime environment. He frames two distinct adoption paths: institutions in developed markets seeking efficiency gains of 50-90% over legacy systems, and emerging markets where people use crypto to escape failing fiat currencies. His current focus is bridging tokenized assets into DeFi for real distribution and adoption. 00:00 Introduction 00:10 Johann Eid's Journey into Crypto and Chainlink 02:16 DeFi Summer 2020: From 20 to 1,000+ Oracle Networks 04:17 Chainlink as 50% of Ethereum Gas During Congestion 06:54 Building a Bulletproof Transaction Manager 07:44 How DeFi Has Evolved Since 2020 08:36 Use Cases Built in 2020 Only Now Getting Adoption 09:49 Real-World Demand: Weekend Trading and Tokenized Gold 10:28 Prediction Markets Replacing Legacy Media Trust 10:58 Chainlink Beyond Oracles: Cross-Chain, Compliance, Privacy 12:24 On-Chain Compliance: Automating KYC with DTCC and Apex 14:04 Privacy as the Missing Piece for Institutional DeFi 15:04 Decentralization as a Killer Use Case in a Mistrustful World 17:05 Why Institutions Are Coming On-Chain Now 18:42 Distribution and Efficiency: Two Drivers of Adoption 20:14 Two Speeds of Adoption: West vs East 21:41 What's Next: Bridging Tokenized Assets into DeFi 23:11 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 Johann Eid X: https://x.com/EidJohann ✅ Follow Chainlink X: https://x.com/Chainlink ✅ 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, Angela Ocando from Uniswap Labs and Ivan Volovyk, a Uniswap Foundation ambassador, introduce the Uniswap API as a way to integrate on-chain swaps into any application in minutes. Angela explains how the API aggregates all of Uniswap's trading infrastructure — including Uniswap v2, v3, v4, UniswapX, and over 25 market makers — so developers can focus on their product rather than building swap infrastructure. She highlights key stats including over $4 trillion in cumulative volume, 17 supported chains, 200ms routing latency, and 97% fill rates. Ivan then does a live demo in Cursor, showing how to create an API key at developers.uniswap.org, install the Uniswap AI skills into a project, and use a simple prompt to implement quoting and swapping functionality in minutes. He demonstrates a playful DnD-themed swap interface pulling real quotes from the Uniswap API. The session covers hackathon bounty details for best Uniswap API integration across trading apps, agent-based systems, automated strategies, and new financial primitives. 00:00 Introduction 01:02 What Is the Uniswap API 02:06 What the API Aggregates 02:30 Uniswap Protocol Stats 03:31 Common Use Cases 03:56 How Integration Works 04:20 Hackathon Bounty and Ideas 05:02 Resources: API Docs, Skills, and QR Codes 05:40 Live Demo: Creating an API Key 06:05 Installing Uniswap AI Skills in Cursor 06:39 Prompting Claude to Implement Swaps 07:17 Demo Results: Real Quotes and Transactions 08:16 Post-Hackathon Support and Closing 08:41 Q&A _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ *ETHGlobal Cannes 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Cannes 2026, a 3-day hackathon held April 3-5 at the Palace of Festivals and Congresses of Cannes, 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 Cannes 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh5YrcvSj6KSTztLMy58d7d4 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *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 · May 9, 2026

In this workshop, Judson Bonneville from Gensyn introduces the Agent eXchange Layer (AXL), a decentralized peer-to-peer mesh networking layer that lets agents, tools, and machine learning workloads discover each other and communicate in a fully encrypted environment. AXL is a single Go binary that handles all networking — message routing, NAT traversal, and dual-layer encryption (hop-by-hop TLS plus end-to-end payload encryption) — with no central servers, DNS, port forwarding, or cloud accounts required. Applications interact through just three HTTP endpoints on localhost: send, receive, and topology. Judson explains how nodes join a bootstrap network and find each other via public keys (like phone numbers), enabling fully peer-to-peer communication where intermediary nodes can see transmissions happening but never the content. He covers AXL's support for MCP (exposing named services for structured JSON-RPC responses) and Google's A2A agent protocol for skill discovery. Use cases include agent collaboration, service registries, private data exchange, distributed inference with pipeline parallelism, and any peer-to-peer application. He demos a group chat app where two nodes message each other and share an OpenClaw agent instance, with the agent maintaining conversation context across multiple users — all built with simple HTTP calls to localhost while AXL handles the infrastructure. 00:00 Introduction 00:12 What Is the Agent eXchange Layer (AXL) 00:53 How AXL Works: Peer-to-Peer Mesh Network 01:36 Application Agnostic: Any Language, Any Payload 01:57 Public Keys as Node Identity 02:17 No Central Servers, No Port Forwarding 02:41 Three Core HTTP Endpoints: Send, Receive, Topology 03:22 Dual-Layer Encryption: TLS and End-to-End 04:26 Building with AXL: Send and Receive Pattern 05:15 Use Cases: Agent Collaboration and Chat Rooms 05:40 MCP and A2A Protocol Support 06:32 Getting Started: Clone, Build, Generate Identity 07:12 What You Can Build with AXL 07:29 Agent Collaboration: Decentralized Research 07:48 Service Registry and Tool Marketplace 08:23 Private Data Exchange with Encryption 08:51 Distributed Inference and Pipeline Parallelism 09:17 Packaged Examples: Gossip, Tensor Exchange, A2A 09:58 Live Demo: Peer-to-Peer Group Chat with OpenClaw Agent 11:27 Shared Agent Instance Across Multiple Users 13:45 How the Demo Works Under the Hood 14:23 Resources and Getting Started 14:41 Closing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *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 KeeperHub* X: https://x.com/KeeperHubApp ✅ *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

Funding the Commons · Apr 9, 2026

The UN has a pipeline of 150 blockchain initiatives. Getting them to scale means the blockchain industry has to build relationships it hasn't prioritized yet—with governments, UN agencies, and civil society. Teodor Petricevic works at the UNDP Alternative Finance Lab in Istanbul. In this conversation, he talks about why cross-chain, cross-sector collaboration has to happen now, and why builders shouldn't compromise their core principles to make it work. Filmed at Funding the Commons Buenos Aires, November 19, 2025. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Relevant Projects UNDP AltFinLab: https://innovation.eurasia.undp.org/altfinlab/ Thank You to Our Sponsors Protocol Labs: https://protocol.ai NEAR Foundation: https://near.foundation Stellar Development Foundation: https://stellar.org human.tech by Holonym Foundation: https://human.tech/ Ethereum Ecosystem Support Program: https://esp.ethereum.foundation/ Drips: https://drips.network Octant: https://octant.app Logos: https://logos.co GoodDollar: https://gooddollar.org Launchnodes: https://launchnodes.com

ETHGlobal · Apr 9, 2026

In this workshop, Matthew Foyle, DevRel lead at Dynamic and Fireblocks, gives a brief overview of Dynamic's wallet infrastructure for ETH Global Cannes builders. Dynamic provides a complete wallet stack available through SDKs and a low-level API, offering Fireblocks-grade security, sub-second signing, and fast implementation for both human users and AI agents. He emphasizes using the SDKs directly rather than pre-built React UIs, and highlights the three-step setup: create an account, grab an environment ID, and install the documentation MCP for AI-assisted development. Matt breaks down the three hackathon prizes totaling $5,000, all judged on "comprehensive use" — a combination of breadth and depth of SDK integration across mobile SDKs (Kotlin, Swift, Flutter, React Native), the JavaScript SDK (framework-agnostic vanilla JS), or the Node SDK. He walks through the quick start flows for each SDK, including an agent-friendly path that lets Claude or Cursor guide configuration decisions. Inspiration categories include digital asset flows, trading flows, cross-border flows, and agentic flows. 00:00 Introduction 00:11 What Is Dynamic 00:52 SDK and API Overview 01:13 Key Features: Fireblocks Security and Fast Signing 01:38 Three Steps to Get Started 02:01 Meet the Team at the Venue 02:24 Hackathon Prizes Overview 02:44 What Is Comprehensive Use 03:55 Use Case Inspiration 04:45 JavaScript SDK Quick Start 05:31 Agent-Friendly Setup Path 06:07 Node SDK Quick Start 06:32 Mobile SDK Example Apps 06:55 Summary and Resources 07:23 Install the Documentation MCP 07:49 Closing Remarks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇫🇷 *ETHGlobal Cannes 2026* This workshop is specifically for ETHGlobal Cannes 2026, a 3-day hackathon held April 3-5 at the Palace of Festivals and Congresses of Cannes, 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 Cannes 2026 playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh5YrcvSj6KSTztLMy58d7d4 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Matthew Foyle* X: https://x.com/MatthewFoyle ✅ *Follow Dynamic* X: https://x.com/dynamic_xyz ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jarrad Hope

Funding the Commons · Mar 9, 2026

Most of the systems we use every day are not private by default. That includes the platforms we communicate on and the financial networks that record how money moves. Jarrad Hope, co-founder of Logos and Director of the Institute of Free Technology, is building alternatives: anonymous communication, decentralized storage, and blockchain systems designed to protect users instead of extracting from them. Privacy is not a feature. It is the foundation of agency. Filmed at Funding the Commons Buenos Aires, November 19, 2025. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Relevant Projects Logos: https://logos.co Institute of Free Technology: https://free.technology Thank You to Our Sponsors Protocol Labs: https://protocol.ai NEAR Foundation: https://near.foundation Stellar Development Foundation: https://stellar.org human.tech by Holonym Foundation: https://human.tech/ Ethereum Ecosystem Support Program: https://esp.ethereum.foundation/ Drips: https://drips.network Octant: https://octant.app Logos: https://logos.co GoodDollar: https://gooddollar.org Launchnodes: https://launchnodes.com

ETHGlobal · Nov 9, 2025

Angela Ocando from the Uniswap Foundation discusses how "hooks" are revolutionizing DeFi by enabling customizable, programmable liquidity pools on Uniswap v4. She explains the evolution from traditional finance’s closed, permissioned systems to DeFi’s open, permissionless infrastructure, highlighting Uniswap’s role in this transformation. Hooks allow developers to add custom logic before and after swaps, enabling innovations like time-weighted average market makers, dynamic fees, and on-chain limit orders. Angela emphasizes the composability and flexibility hooks bring, likening them to "money legos" for DeFi. She introduces Uniswap Foundation’s resources for builders, including grants, education, hackathons, and a hook incubator, encouraging participation in the evolving DeFi ecosystem. The talk underscores programmable liquidity as foundational for the future of open finance and invites developers, founders, and business professionals to contribute to DeFi’s growth. 00:00 Introduction 00:35 What Happens When You Trade Crypto? 01:10 Traditional Finance vs. DeFi 02:04 Uniswap and Liquidity Pools 03:18 How a Swap Works 03:45 Limitations of Previous Protocols 04:17 Introduction to Hooks 05:20 Use Cases for Hooks 06:19 On-Chain Limit Orders & Composability 06:55 Uniswap v4 Features 07:48 Hooks as Money Legos 08:38 Ideas for Hooks & Builder Opportunities 09:18 Uniswap Foundation’s Mission 09:45 Builder Resources & Support 10:48 Hackathons, Courses, and Community 12:19 The Future of DeFi & Programmable Liquidity 12:43 Community & Closing Remarks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *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 Angela Ocando X: https://x.com/ocandocrypto ✅ Follow Uniswap Foundation X: https://x.com/UniswapFND ✅ 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

Akshat Gada’s session, Polygon Tracks 101, introduces developers to the Polygon payments track and its integration with the X42 protocol, a blockchain-based payments standard designed for agentic and automated payments. The talk explains how X42 simplifies blockchain complexity through a “facilitator,” which handles on-chain settlement, verification, and gas fees—allowing agents or APIs to transact using simple HTTP requests. Akshat demonstrates how X42 enables seamless payments between a buyer and a seller (e.g., accessing a paid weather API), where the buyer first receives a 402 Payment Required response, then makes the payment through the facilitator, which finalizes the transaction on Polygon’s testnet. He then discusses how X42 enables agent-to-agent commerce, making micropayments and pay-per-use APIs frictionless. Developers are encouraged to build with TypeScript using the X42 Express and X42 Fetch packages, with Polygon as the supported network. The facilitator URL provided during the hackathon acts as a shared payment hub. Akshat suggests ideas such as monetized AI agents, paid MCP tools, and pay-to-crawl websites—highlighting Cloudflare’s example of charging AI crawlers for data access. He concludes by emphasizing that building on X42 early offers unique opportunities for innovation and potential grant support from Polygon for exceptional projects. 00:02 – Introduction & Hackathon Overview 00:31 – Polygon Payments Track with X42 Protocol 01:32 – What is X42 and How It Works 03:21 – Agentic Payments Flow (Buyer, Seller, Facilitator) 04:41 – Live Demo: Weather API Payment Example 07:04 – Building Paid MCP Tools with X42 08:15 – Why Use X42: Standardized Agent Payments 08:59 – Technical Setup: TypeScript, Express, and Fetch Packages 09:41 – Role of the Facilitator (Gasless Transactions) 10:32 – Project Ideas & Use Cases for X42 11:14 – Cloudflare “Pay-to-Crawl” Example 12:18 – Polygon’s Future Support & Builder Opportunities _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *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 Polygon* X: https://x.com/0xPolygon ✅ *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 · Nov 9, 2025

Gathin T from ZeroG introduces the project as a Layer 1 blockchain dedicated to onchain AI, powered by a decentralized AI operating system that combines storage, compute, and data availability into a verifiable, trustless architecture. He contrasts this with closed AI systems—“black boxes” that hide training data, alignment processes, and inferencing logic—arguing that ZeroG decentralizes every layer of AI: from uploading datasets, to training and inferencing with cryptographic proofs. Its modular stack includes a fast, low-cost EVM-compatible chain, a decentralized storage network (95% cheaper than AWS or Arweave), a scalable data availability layer for verifiable AI workloads, and a compute network that provides verifiable inferencing through trusted execution environments (TEE) and zero-knowledge proofs. The compute layer enables GPU providers to monetize idle capacity and users to select inference models by cost and quality, creating a service marketplace for AI models, fine-tuning, and RAG pipelines. ZeroG separates consensus and execution for scalability, achieving 11,000+ TPS and sub-100ms finality. Builders can deploy dapps for AI dev tooling, analytics, DeFi, memecoins, or NFTs using the Builder Hub’s SDKs and documentation. The project recently launched its mainnet, offering $10K in hackathon bounties for developers building early ecosystem tools. ZeroG’s vision is a transparent, verifiable AI ecosystem—fully onchain, censorship-resistant, and economically open to model creators, GPU operators, and users alike. 00:02 – Introduction to ZeroG and decentralized AI 00:44 – The problem with closed AI systems 01:12 – Overview of ZeroG’s modular stack 01:41 – Layer 1 chain and storage architecture 02:22 – Data availability and verifiability 03:13 – Compute network: verifiable inferencing explained 03:32 – Alignment nodes and decentralization governance 03:58 – AI service marketplace and future RAG/fine-tuning support 04:28 – EVM-compatible chain architecture & mainnet performance 05:27 – ZeroG Storage: 95% cheaper, instant retrieval 06:29 – Storage mechanism: chunking, VRF distribution, Merkle proofs 07:22 – Data availability issues and ZeroG’s improvements 08:48 – Security, scalability, and Ethereum-aligned standards 09:12 – Use cases for AI, ML, and modular L1/L2 integrations 09:44 – Compute network and decentralized GPU marketplace 10:56 – Example: model selection and cost flexibility 11:51 – Trustless execution vs centralized inference bias 12:44 – Workflow for users and GPU providers 13:26 – Builder Hub and testnet/mainnet resources 14:03 – Hackathon details and $10K bounty 14:36 – Ecosystem roadmap and mainnet launch 15:09 – Closing remarks and builder invitation _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇮🇳 *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 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

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

Stani Kulechov

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave and Avara, in this insightful conversation from Pragma Singapore 2024. Stani shares his journey towards achieving product-market fit in DeFi and Web3, exploring Aave’s evolution, the vision behind Avara, the strategic use of account abstraction and ZK stack for Lens Protocol, and crucial advice for crypto founders on building user-centric products. Discover how to effectively respond to user needs, scale products, and drive mainstream adoption. 00:00 Socks & Sandals: The Avara Way 01:50 What Product Market Fit Means in Crypto 02:46 Navigating Reactive vs. User-Driven Development 04:33 Identifying Users for True Product Market Fit 06:17 Challenges in Web3 User Identification 07:21 From Aave to Avara: Expanding the Vision 09:42 Democratizing Financial Access with DeFi 10:17 Building the People-Powered Internet 11:55 Family Wallet & Open Infrastructure Vision 12:29 Introducing Aave V4: Enhancing Efficiency 13:47 Liquidity Layers and Risk Management in Aave V4 15:25 Why Lens Protocol Chose ZK Stack & Validium 17:02 Balancing Security, Scalability, and Decentralization 18:09 Appropriate Security Levels for Use Cases 19:48 Achieving Mainstream Onboarding without Fees 21:19 Key Advice for Crypto Founders in 2024 23:22 When to Launch: MVP vs. Polished Products _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *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 Stani Kulechov* X: https://x.com/StaniKulechov ✅ *Follow Avara* X: https://x.com/Avara ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sandeep Nailwal

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder of Polygon Labs, joins Kartik Talwar at Pragma Singapore 2024 to discuss the future of the AggLayer, Polygon’s bold thesis for a unified, scalable multichain future. In this engaging fireside chat, Sandeep unpacks the recent transition from MATIC to POL, challenges with exchanges, the vision behind AggLayer, and how Ethereum can evolve into the best possible settlement layer. He critiques the current Ethereum ecosystem’s focus on token price over infrastructure, explains why decentralization and censorship resistance are critical, and makes a compelling case for infinite scalability through interconnected chains. Learn how AggLayer enables seamless value movement, unified liquidity, canonical tokens, and composable apps across thousands of chains, and why it might be the Solana-like UX Ethereum has needed. 00:00 Intro: Fireside Format with Sandeep Nailwal 01:18 Polygon’s MATIC to POL Token Transition Recap 03:00 Why Exchanges Delayed the POL Migration 04:24 Lessons from the Token Migration Process 05:23 Ethereum Community FUD and Token Upgrade Challenges 06:24 Concerns with Ethereum’s Shift in Priorities 08:01 What Makes a Great Settlement Layer? 08:56 Ethereum’s Decentralization, Censorship Resistance 09:56 Other Key Metrics for Settlement Layer Quality 11:00 Precompiles and ZK for Efficient Settlement 12:08 Should L1 Do More or Enable L2s? 13:07 Cycles of Sentiment and Solana’s Rise 14:37 Long-Term Community Retention is the Real Test 15:33 AggLayer Thesis: Fixing Liquidity Fragmentation 16:11 Seamless Interoperability in Web3 17:13 Infinite Scalability via Appchains and L2s 18:43 Appchains Need Custom UX and Gas Models 19:18 AggLayer = Unified Liquidity, Shared Token Mapping 20:20 One Address Across All Chains: Solana-Like UX 21:17 AggLayer as Web3’s Endgame Architecture 21:41 How to Foster L2 Collaboration and Interoperability 22:46 Narrative & Business Model Compatibility for L2s 23:16 Final Thoughts: Collaboration Over Competition _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *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 Sandeep Nailwal* X: https://x.com/sandeepnailwal ✅ *Follow Polygon Labs* X: https://x.com/0xPolygon ✅ *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

In this keynote from Pragma Singapore 2024, Ayush Ranjan, Co-founder and CEO of Huddle01, dives deep into the future of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) and how Huddle01 is pioneering Realtime Communication (RTC) on a decentralized mesh. Learn how Huddle01 reduces latency, cuts infrastructure costs, and decentralizes communication by running on community-powered media nodes. Ayush outlines why "less physical" in DePIN (aka more digital-first) results in better scalability, economics, and trust. He also reveals how Huddle01’s QoS-driven approach enables verifiable, low-latency communication across the globe. Whether you're a builder, founder, or investor in Web3, DePIN, or communication infrastructure, this talk is packed with technical insights, protocol design philosophies, and bold predictions for the future of decentralized connectivity. 00:00 Intro to DePIN and Huddle01 00:58 What is Realtime Communication (RTC)? 01:28 RTC’s role in decentralized infrastructure 01:59 High cost of RTC and AWS reliance 03:00 Geographical latency issues in video calls 04:03 Why communication innovation stalled 04:28 Understanding DePIN and its digital vs physical layers 05:23 The DePIN debate: More or Less “P”? 06:25 Introducing Virtual Infrastructure Networks (ViVIN) 06:54 Verifying nodes through QoS, not hardware 07:22 QoS metrics: bitrate, packet loss, latency 08:20 Solving sub-100ms global latency 09:18 Node specs and performance validation 09:48 Making QoS tests tamper-proof 10:19 Defining network score thresholds 10:49 Importance of low latency in LLM interactions 11:14 Scaling digital networks without logistics 11:42 Huddle01’s subsystem architecture 12:11 Meet app: P2P, secure, decentralized Zoom alternative 12:38 SDKs for integrating RTC in 5 minutes 13:05 Media nodes and people-powered infrastructure 13:35 Internet speed & privacy in decentralized RTC 14:08 Easy node setup and bootstrapping rewards 14:36 Why DePINs must build their own demand 14:59 Sustainable business model through RTC SDK 15:23 Revenue and adoption metrics 15:53 180p quality and immersive communication 16:20 Solving latency for immersive & VR use cases 16:52 The Huddle01 economy explained 17:20 Who is using Huddle01 today 17:52 Video conferencing + livestreaming on one platform 18:24 What’s next: nodes, partners, staking, whitepaper 19:03 The team and global infrastructure footprint 19:33 RTC: the hardest bandwidth layer to solve 20:03 Two keys to scaling DePIN successfully 20:32 Closing remarks _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *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 Ayush Ranjan* X: https://x.com/ranjan3118 ✅ *Follow Huddle01* X: https://x.com/huddle01com ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar, Sandy Peng

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

In this engaging fireside chat at Pragma Singapore 2024, Sandy Peng, co-founder of Scroll, joins Kartik Talwar from ETHGlobal to dive deep into the past, present, and future of Scroll and the broader Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem. With Scroll’s first year post-mainnet launch, Sandy reflects on critical learnings, protocol upgrades, ecosystem growth, and what sets Scroll apart in a competitive rollup landscape. From zkEVM advancements, faster proving times, and the role of brand moat in L2 dominance, to Scroll Sessions, user incentive models, and the future of on-chain identity and RWA integrations—this chat is packed with insights for anyone building or investing in Web3 infrastructure. 00:00 Intro: Sandy Peng & Scroll at 1-Year Mainnet 00:43 What Went Well & What Didn’t After Launch 03:06 What Scroll Would Do Differently Post-Launch 04:47 Scroll’s Edge: Fast Finality and L2 Interop 06:24 Understanding Finality vs Proving Time 07:33 Designing Scroll Sessions Incentive Programs 09:12 Incentives as Liquidity GPS for Ecosystem 10:25 Scroll’s Learnings on Capital & User Behavior 11:36 ETHery Credit Card Campaign & On-Chain UX 13:19 Reaching Beyond DeFi: RWA & TradFi Onboarding 14:29 African USDT Arbitrage as On-Chain Yield 15:33 Popular Apps & Tech Trends on Scroll 16:46 ZK Builders vs Biz Growth: Finding the Balance 17:54 Scroll Protocol Upgrades & Mathematician Naming 19:49 Thoughts on New zkVMs and Future L2 Design 21:30 How Scroll Competes in the Evolving L2 Race 22:34 Why Brand Is the Lasting Moat for L2s 23:45 Scroll as a Brand: Nike vs Adidas Analogy 24:18 Closing Remarks & Scroll’s Future Vision _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *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 Sandy Peng* X: https://x.com/sandyzkp ✅ *Follow Scroll* X: https://x.com/Scroll_ZKP ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Dominic Williams, Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Dominic Williams, Founder of DFINITY and Chief Scientist of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), in this fascinating fireside chat at Pragma Singapore 2024. This session explores the future of AI on-chain, the evolution of blockchain technology, and how smart contracts on the Internet Computer are redefining decentralization, security, and scale. Discover how ICP enables secure, scalable, and tamperproof AI models to run as smart contracts, and why traditional Web2 infrastructure falls short. Dominic breaks down key innovations like chain-key cryptography, deterministic GPU execution, and chain fusion, allowing seamless, trustless interoperability with Ethereum and Bitcoin. 00:00 Intro to Dominic Williams & Internet Computer 00:51 Origins of DFINITY and Vision for a World Computer 03:01 Smart Contracts as Next-Gen Software 04:10 Properties of Tamperproof Smart Contracts 05:25 Why AI Needs Blockchain Security 07:10 The “Hot Wallet” Problem for AI Data 08:19 Running AI Models as Smart Contracts 09:13 ICP's Execution Environment & Memory Limits 10:23 Scaling to Run LLMs on Chain 12:15 SIMD, Optimizations, and Llama 3 on ICP 13:13 Current Limits and GPU Delegation Challenges 14:47 Inference vs. Training for On-Chain AI 15:47 Vector Databases and On-Chain Prompt Engineering 16:59 Challenges of GPU Determinism for Blockchains 18:31 AI Use Cases: Smart Wallets, Law, Autonomy 19:55 AI-Generated Web Apps and Autonomous Upgrades 21:57 The Ultimate Platform for AI Agents 23:29 Chain-Key Crypto and Chain Fusion Overview 24:38 Interoperability with Ethereum and Bitcoin 26:13 Fully Autonomous DApps and Decentralized Governance 26:43 Closing Thoughts on Fully On-Chain AI & DApps _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *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 DFINITY* X: https://x.com/dfinity ✅ *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

In this high-impact talk at Pragma Singapore 2024, Mike Cahill, founder of Duoro Labs and a core contributor to the Pyth Network, breaks down how we can supercharge DeFi infrastructure to outperform traditional finance (TradFi) by improving cost, speed, and trust. Mike explores why DeFi struggles to compete with TradFi UX, how Pyth’s HiFi data oracle architecture changes the game, and what it means for the future of blockchain applications. Learn how Pyth price feeds, entropy for randomness, and Express Relay for MEV protection are already powering 400+ dApps across 80+ chains, enabling fast, low-cost, and trustworthy on-chain finance. 00:00 Intro and “Why DeFi Sucks” Compared to TradFi 01:29 TradFi Speed, Cost, and Trust Advantage 02:36 Why New Tech Adoption Requires Parity with Incumbents 03:39 Amazon vs Sears: Web Speed Parallels Blockchain Evolution 05:14 Blockchain’s Innovation: Programmatic Trust 06:26 From DeFi Summer to Modern Blockchains 08:04 Pyth Network: Boosting DeFi Infrastructure 08:34 Price Feeds: Solving the Oracle Problem with Speed 10:06 How Pyth Sources Institutional-Grade Market Data 11:04 PythNet: Data Aggregation & Multi-Chain Distribution 12:08 Monetizing Oracle Data Across 80+ Blockchains 13:12 Entropy: Verifiable On-Chain Randomness 14:30 Express Relay: Solving the MEV Problem 15:42 Instant Access to Liquidation & Searchers Network 16:44 Adoption: Pyth Powers 60% of On-Chain Derivatives 17:26 Closing: Beating TradFi with Superior DeFi Infrastructure _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇸🇬 *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 Mike Cahill* X: https://x.com/mdomcahill ✅ *Follow Duoro Labs* X: https://x.com/DouroLabs ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Welcome to Pragma San Francisco 2024, presented by ETHGlobal! In this opening keynote, ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar introduces a two-day single-track Web3 summit focused on accessibility, pragmatism, and the future of blockchain. Discover what makes Pragma unique: no parallel sessions, no fluff—just high-signal conversations with founders, protocol builders, and decision-makers shaping Ethereum and the broader crypto ecosystem. Kartik walks through the agenda, introduces new primitives like NFC-enabled Ethereum wristbands, the Pragma SF Pack, and shares how attendees can network using on-chain tools. Plus, get an overview of upcoming talks on AI, ZK, rollups, DePIN, Bitcoin L2s, programmable wallets, fully homomorphic encryption, and more. 00:00 Welcome to Pragma SF 2024 00:20 Why this Pragma is special (2-day format) 00:53 What "pragma" means in Web3 01:27 Making Web3 more accessible 01:59 Single-track, no side stages 02:32 Founder-only, future-focused talks 03:01 Mostly non-technical, high-signal content 03:33 25 talks, 5 interviews over 2 days 04:03 Where to find the full agenda 04:30 Attendees from 34 countries 04:57 Thanking 11 partner projects 05:30 Shoutout to Pragma SF Pack participants 05:58 Blending on-chain and off-chain experiences 06:26 Ethereum NFC wristbands explained 07:00 Wristbands = on-chain identities 07:27 Networking with wristbands 07:55 Wristbands also work for the hackathon 08:34 Day 1 agenda overview begins 08:34 Talk: Using AI to secure dApps 08:52 Talk: The future of real world assets 09:05 Talk: The future of consumer crypto apps 09:16 Talk: Privacy-preserving smart contracts 09:32 Talk: Rollup fragmentation and TEEs 09:45 Talk: Programmable transportation with DePIN 09:59 Talk: DeFi accessibility for TradFi 10:12 Talk: Yield innovations in Web3 10:22 Talk: Simplifying DeFi trades via 0x 10:34 Talk: Bitcoin L2s and EVM integration 10:42 Talk: Mobile crypto payments with Vora 10:52 Talk: Programmable wallets via Circle 11:04 Talk: Should you build your own rollup? 11:17 Talk: FHE on the EVM and crypto privacy 11:35 Talk: General purpose vs app-specific rollups 11:47 Schedule available at ethglobal.com/pragma _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *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 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Jayant Krishnamurthy, CTO and co-founder of Pyth Network, breaks down why DeFi struggles to compete with traditional finance (TradFi) and how infrastructure improvements can bridge the gap. He compares DeFi and TradFi across speed, cost, and trust, highlighting key pain points like high gas fees, slow transactions, and security risks. Krishnamurthy also explores how Pyth Network’s solutions—such as low-latency price feeds, on-chain randomness, and MEV reduction—are paving the way for a more efficient DeFi ecosystem. Learn how better infrastructure can enable DeFi to finally rival TradFi in usability and adoption. 00:00 - Introduction 00:42 - The Problem with DeFi 01:16 - TradFi vs. DeFi Comparison 03:20 - Infrastructure as the Key 05:15 - Lessons from Past Tech Shifts 07:50 - Blockchain’s Programmable Trust 09:49 - Pyth Network’s Solutions 12:17 - High-Frequency Price Feeds 13:20 - On-Chain Randomness 15:14 - Solving MEV 18:15 - Oracles & DeFi Growth 19:52 - Future of DeFi vs. TradFi 20:19 - Conclusion _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *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 Jayant Krishnamurthy* X: https://x.com/jayantkrish ✅ *Follow Pyth Network* X: https://x.com/PythNetwork ✅ *Follow ETHGlobal* X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/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 how Web3 can achieve mainstream adoption through native mobile experiences with Denisse Halm, founder at Mobile Stack and Valora. Discover the critical gaps limiting Web3 growth, the vast potential of global smartphone usage, and the necessity for user-centric mobile applications. Learn how Mobile Stack simplifies creating engaging, secure, and accessible Web3 apps, facilitating adoption beyond current crypto users. Featuring insights into app development, UX considerations, and consumer-focused innovations. 00:00 Intro: Making Web3 Mobile for Everyone 00:51 About Denisse Halm, Valora & Mobile Stack 01:35 Global Smartphone Adoption Trends 02:13 Crypto Ownership vs Actual Web3 Usage 03:40 Web2 UX Expectations vs Web3 Reality 04:14 Complex Web3 User Journeys Explained 05:30 Importance of Seamless User Experience 06:55 Infrastructure Exists, but Who Uses It? 07:29 Major Web3 Projects Going Mobile 08:14 Gap Analysis: Mobile Web3 Experiences 08:52 Opportunities for Mass Crypto Adoption 09:37 Challenges of Building Mobile Web3 Apps 10:47 UX & Security Trade-offs in Mobile Apps 11:24 Key User Journeys in Web3 Products 12:05 Increasing Consumer Confidence in Web3 12:42 Introducing Mobile Stack Platform 13:21 Demo: Hypothetical Curve Mobile App 13:56 Customizable Branding & UX in Apps 14:33 Single-App Web3 User Experience Explained 15:10 Mobile Stack Features & Integrations 16:18 Key Plugins for Enhanced User Experience 17:22 Mobile-First Strategies for Global Users 18:03 Case Study: SheFi’s Web3 Education App 19:22 Conclusion & How to Connect _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *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 Denisse Halm* X: https://x.com/hola_denisse ✅ *Follow Valora* X: https://x.com/valora ✅ *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

n this insightful presentation from Pragma San Francisco 2024, Kautuk Kundan, founder of Stackr Labs, dives deep into the debate between general-purpose and application-specific blockchain systems. Explore critical insights into Ethereum, Solana, rollups, ZK VMs, domain-specific chains, and the rise of custom L2 solutions. Understand the trade-offs in scalability, decentralization, efficiency, resource allocation, and value capture strategies. Ideal for developers, blockchain enthusiasts, and crypto industry professionals exploring rollups, blockchain infrastructure, and decentralized application (dApp) optimization. 00:00 Intro - General Purpose vs App-Specific Systems 00:49 Speaker Intro - Kautuk Kundan & Stackr Labs Overview 01:18 General vs Specific Systems Explained with Examples 02:11 Defining General Purpose & App-Specific Systems 02:40 Advantages of General Purpose Systems (Ethereum, Solana) 03:38 Limitations of General Purpose Blockchains & ZK VMs 04:32 Benefits of App-Specific Blockchain Systems 05:29 Innovation Examples from App-Specific Systems (Formula 1) 05:58 Examples of App-Specific Chains & ZKMs (dYdX, Cairo, Noir) 06:30 Challenges & Limitations of App-Specific Systems 07:23 Common Issues: Silos, Niches & Resource Intensiveness 08:19 Finding Balance: Domain-Specific Chains as a Solution 09:14 Domain-Specific Chains Defined & Explained 09:43 Benefits & Examples of Domain-Specific Blockchains (OP Stack) 10:40 The Future: App-Specific Chains with Better UX & Tooling 11:06 Rise of Domain & App-Specific Chains in Blockchain 11:35 How to Choose Between General & App-Specific Systems 12:28 Evaluating Resource Costs for Blockchain Projects 13:21 Path to Building an App Chain (Decision Mindmap) 13:47 App-to-App Chain Cycle Explained (John Sharp Model) 14:12 Real-World Examples of App-to-General Chain Evolution (AO) 14:44 Stackr Labs SDK Overview - Custom L2 Rollups 15:14 Why Projects Launch Custom L2s: Value & Revenue Capture 15:43 Revenue Data: Sequencer Fees & Value Capture 16:11 Decentralization Issues with Custom L2 Sequencers 16:38 "Fat App" Thesis: Shifting Value Capture to Applications 17:03 Cost-Benefit Analysis: App Chains, Domain Chains & Sequencing 17:30 Value Capture Examples: Blast & App-Specific Sequencing 17:58 Final Thoughts & Advice for Blockchain Infrastructure Devs _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *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 the Kautuk Kundan* X: https://x.com/Kautukkundan ✅ *Follow the Stackr Labs* X: https://x.com/0xStackr ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Furqan Rydhan (CEO & Co-Founder of Thirdweb) in a fireside chat about building developer tooling, embracing open-source infrastructure, and attracting new builders to Web3. Learn how Thirdweb evolved from hacking prototypes in 2019 to creating a full-stack platform (front-end tools, back-end services, and on-chain capabilities) that simplifies building powerful decentralized applications. Discover Furqan’s insights into SF’s thriving tech scene, how to balance open-source and sustainability, and why public blockchains are the future of app development. 00:00 Intro & Fireside Chat Setup 00:03 Welcoming Furqan from Thirdweb 00:50 Furqan’s Background & Early Entrepreneurship 02:14 Transition to Building in Web3 03:12 Origins of Thirdweb & Developer Pain Points 04:14 Finding Hair-on-Fire Problems 06:06 Building a Full-Stack Platform 07:56 Navigating Fast-Changing Crypto Trends 10:15 Choosing a Long-Term Vision Over Fads 11:57 Open Source as a Core Value 14:23 Balancing Open Source & a Sustainable Business 17:27 Being SF-Based & The Global Crypto Community 19:08 Community Building & In-Person Energy 20:17 Public Infrastructure & the Future of Apps 21:09 Closing Thoughts & Applause _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🎤 *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 YouTube Playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh4LcwDpGf_itZrAu7XRNb07&si=seq9cgKcdpZfWEai ETHGlobal's Pragma series, which began in Tokyo in the spring of 2023, has been fostering a curated, global community of individuals who deeply care about web3. You can learn more about Pragma and upcoming events in the series here: https://ethglobal.com/pragma _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Furqan Rydhan X: https://x.com/FurqanR ✅ Follow Thirdweb X: https://x.com/thirdweb Website: https://thirdweb.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thirdweb_ ✅ 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kartik Talwar

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Dieter Shirley, Chief Architect of Flow Foundation, and Kartik Talwar from ETHGlobal, in a deep dive into Flow's major Crescendo upgrade. Learn how Flow now supports EVM compatibility within Cadence, dramatically enhancing blockchain interoperability, developer flexibility, and user experiences. Dieter shares insights from his extensive experience with CryptoKitties, smart contract scalability, and designing blockchains for mainstream adoption. Discover how Flow's architectural innovations offer unmatched speed, scalability, and decentralization. 00:00 Introduction: Dieter Shirley & Flow's Major Upgrade 00:41 Celebrating ETHGlobal's Impact & History 01:58 Exploring Trade-offs in Blockchain Development 02:25 Flow's Major Crescendo Network Upgrade 03:18 How Flow Built an Early Data Availability Layer 03:55 Flow's Improved Speed & Scalability Metrics 04:23 Cadence 1.0: The Next-gen Smart Contract Language 04:52 Introducing EVM Equivalence on Flow Blockchain 06:30 Why Flow Adopted EVM Despite Cadence Advantages 08:06 Technical Approach: Running EVM Inside Cadence 09:49 How Flow EVM Uses Efficient Native State Storage 10:27 Impact on Cross-chain Infrastructure Providers 10:57 New Opportunities for EVM-first Developers 11:27 Enhancing Solidity with Cadence Extensions 12:34 Advanced Features Exclusive to Cadence vs. Solidity 13:38 Example: Atomic Multi-call Transactions in Cadence 15:06 Benefits for Native Cadence Developers from EVM 16:38 How Flow Attracts Mainstream Crypto Adoption 17:40 Advice on Building Consumer-friendly Blockchain Apps 20:03 Balancing User Friction & Motivating Features 20:42 Flow EVM: Implications for Ethereum Ecosystem 22:23 The Superior Developer Experience of Cadence 22:56 Flow Foundation's Long-term Vision & North Star 24:35 Decentralization as Core Promise of Flow Blockchain 25:45 Conclusion: Building Sustainable Apps on Flow _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *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 Dieter Shirley* X: https://x.com/dete73 ✅ *Follow Flow Foundation* X: https://x.com/flow_blockchain ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Ganesh Swami, Co-Founder of Covalent, for a deep dive into the freshly released AI Agent SDK. Discover how to build autonomous AI agents, harness Chain of Thought models, and explore the revolutionary concept of the Zero Employee Enterprise (ZEE)—where swarms of agents iteratively collaborate to solve complex tasks. In this talk, Ganesh walks through setting up agents, adding tools (like GoldRush for on-chain data), and contributing to Covalent’s open-source ZEE workflow and AI Agent SDK. Gain insights into modular data infrastructure, crypto use cases, and how you can start building advanced LLM-powered solutions with Covalent. 00:00 Introduction & Overview 00:46 Zero Employee Enterprise (ZEE) 01:20 Chain of Thought Models Explained 01:51 Agent Autonomy & Collaboration 02:36 AI Agent SDK Blog Post 03:53 Exploring Documentation 04:28 Building an LLM Agent 05:52 Tools & GoldRush On-Chain Data 07:02 ZE Workflow & Routing 08:18 Open-Source Repo Tour 11:08 Quickstart: Create Z App 12:10 Use Cases & Contributing 13:17 Final Thoughts & Hackathon Origins _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum* Agentic Ethereum is an online, async hackathon that runs from Jan. 31 to Feb. 12, 2025. With over $175,000 USD in prizes, Agentic Ethereum is a great way to dive into the world of autonomous AI agents and explore how they can revolutionize projects on Ethereum. Start the year with groundbreaking innovation! Watch the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7jxP_flgRf5nZ_WDgFpBy3&si=RZozbd9C5KrG6Bf3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Ganesh Swami* X: https://x.com/gane5h ✅ *Follow Covalent* X: https://x.com/Covalent_HQ Website: https://www.covalenthq.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGn-T9qPiXAx490Wr6WPbOw ✅ *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 Privy Server Wallets with Henri Stern—a powerful, low-level API that lets you spin up, manage, and control crypto wallets directly from your backend. Learn how to deploy wallets at scale, set robust transaction policies, and provide frictionless access to Bitcoin, Solana, and EVM chains for your application. Whether you’re building a fleet of wallets for AI agents or simplifying user onboarding, Privy Server Wallets offer secure, programmable control of digital assets. Watch to see how these server-based wallets work in real time and discover new ways to streamline your crypto infrastructure. 00:00 Introduction to Server Wallets 00:39 Fleet of Wallets at Scale 01:09 Receiving Funds On-Chain 01:42 Live Transaction Demo 02:08 Wrap-Up & Next Steps _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum* Agentic Ethereum is an online, async hackathon that runs from Jan. 31 to Feb. 12, 2025. With over $175,000 USD in prizes, Agentic Ethereum is a great way to dive into the world of autonomous AI agents and explore how they can revolutionize projects on Ethereum. Start the year with groundbreaking innovation! Watch the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7jxP_flgRf5nZ_WDgFpBy3&si=RZozbd9C5KrG6Bf3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Henri Stern* X: https://x.com/henri_stern ✅ *Follow Privy* X: https://x.com/privy_io Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/privy Website: https://www.privy.io ✅ *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

In this dynamic panel from the Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit, top builders and researchers discuss the infrastructure needed to support AI agents on Ethereum. Moderated by Dmarz (Flashbots), the conversation dives into how layer-2 scaling, computational resources, on-chain registries, and decentralized identity can enable the next wave of agentic applications. From handling autonomous transactions and bridging trust with World ID to enabling unstoppable AI-driven DApps, our panelists share real-world examples, pain points, and the potential for unstoppable on-chain agents. Join Shaw (Eliza Labs), Davide Crapis (PIN AI), Dcbuilder (World), Andrew Miller (Teleport/Flashbots), Jasper Zhang (Hyperbolic), Mark Tyneway (OP Labs) and Chase Allred (Offchain Labs) to see how the Ethereum ecosystem is preparing to scale for an AI-first future—and discover what you can build next! Like, share, and subscribe for more in-depth sessions on agentic governance, AI infrastructure, and the future of Web3. 00:00 Introduction: Infra for Agentic Apps 00:48 Panelist Introductions & Backgrounds 01:22 Why Agents Matter on Ethereum 02:25 On-Chain Registries & Discovery 03:57 Trust, Payments & Autonomy with AI Agents 05:25 Scaling, Compute & Future Opportunities 07:02 Practical Use Cases & Hackathon Ideas 08:45 Closing Remarks & Next Steps _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit* Join the official Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit for an in-depth look at AI agents, smart contracts, and how they converge to power the next era of decentralized intelligence. This is more than just a summit—it's a gathering of the brightest minds in our ecosystem, and we're honored to have Andrew Miller, Anna Kazlauskas, Davide Crapis, dcbuilder, Ed Felten, Erik Voorhees, Illia Polosukhin, Jasper Zhang, Karl Floersch, Ken Ng, Kevin Owocki, Linda Xie, Shaw, Tomasz Stanczak, Chase Allred and Vitalik Buterin and on stage for this virtual summit focused around AI Agents and Blockchain! Watch the full Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit Playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6DrYO4ORk8wzQ5wCZDs0mW&si=ARqB9gaXAqehWH1_ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum 2025* Agentic Ethereum is an online, async hackathon that runs from Jan. 31 to Feb. 12, 2025. With over $175,000 USD in prizes, Agentic Ethereum is a great way to dive into the world of autonomous AI agents and explore how they can revolutionize projects on Ethereum. Start the year with groundbreaking innovation! Watch the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7jxP_flgRf5nZ_WDgFpBy3&si=RZozbd9C5KrG6Bf3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Dmarz X: https://x.com/DistributedMarz ✅ Follow Shaw & Eliza Labs X: https://x.com/shawmakesmagic Website: https://www.elizaos.ai ✅ Follow Davide Crapis & PIN AI X: https://x.com/DavideCrapis X: https://x.com/PINAI_IO ✅ Follow Dcbuilder & World X: https://x.com/DCbuild3r X: https://x.com/worldcoinfnd ✅ Follow Andrew Miller X: https://x.com/socrates1024 Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/socrates1024 ✅ Follow Jasper Zhang & Hyperbolic X: https://x.com/zjasper666 X: https://x.com/Hyperbolic_Labs ✅ Follow Mark Tyneway & OP Labs X: https://x.com/tyneslol X: https://x.com/OPLabsPBC ✅ Follow Chase Allred & Offchain Labs X: https://x.com/allred_chase X: https://x.com/offchainlabs ✅ 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Illia Polosukhin

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Ed Felten (Offchain Labs) and Illia Polosukhin (NEAR) at the Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit as they dive into the intersection of AI and blockchain. Discover how verifiable compute, TEEs, rollups, and WASM-based smart contracts are empowering new on-chain AI services. Learn how developers can orchestrate complex AI inference through asynchronous message passing, ensure liveness, and harness decentralized infrastructure to scale AI-driven dApps. This thought-provoking panel led by ETHGlobal founder Kartik Talwar highlights real-world use cases—from AI-based DeFi automation and verifiable oracles to on-chain governance and “AI presidents.” If you’re curious about bridging the gap between AI and crypto, this session covers fundamental research insights, next-gen developer tooling, and how emerging solutions like zero-knowledge proofs might reshape distributed AI. 00:00 Intro: AI & Blockchain Intersection 00:44 Research & Practical Blockchain Applications 02:24 Decentralization & Power Structures 05:56 AI Community vs. Crypto Community Mindsets 08:16 Ensuring Liveness with Secure Enclaves 10:01 Rollups & EVM Upgrades for AI 12:42 WASM & Asynchronous Execution 15:22 Handling Complex AI Inference On-Chain 19:08 Practical Limits & Resource Constraints 22:12 Advice for Developers (Latency & MEV) 25:59 Assistant Agents & On-Chain Agents 30:55 Privacy, Verifiability & ZK Challenges 37:03 Real-World AI+Crypto Applications 41:29 AI in Governance & Future Outlook 42:09 Conclusion & Final Thoughts _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit* Join the official Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit for an in-depth look at AI agents, smart contracts, and how they converge to power the next era of decentralized intelligence. This is more than just a summit—it's a gathering of the brightest minds in our ecosystem, and we're honored to have Andrew Miller, Anna Kazlauskas, Davide Crapis, dcbuilder, Ed Felten, Erik Voorhees, Illia Polosukhin, Jasper Zhang, Karl Floersch, Ken Ng, Kevin Owocki, Linda Xie, Shaw, Tomasz Stanczak, Chase Allred and Vitalik Buterin and on stage for this virtual summit focused around AI Agents and Blockchain! Watch the full Agentic Ethereum 2025 Summit Playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6DrYO4ORk8wzQ5wCZDs0mW&si=ARqB9gaXAqehWH1_ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum 2025* Agentic Ethereum is an online, async hackathon that runs from Jan. 31 to Feb. 12, 2025. With over $175,000 USD in prizes, Agentic Ethereum is a great way to dive into the world of autonomous AI agents and explore how they can revolutionize projects on Ethereum. Start the year with groundbreaking innovation! Watch the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7jxP_flgRf5nZ_WDgFpBy3&si=RZozbd9C5KrG6Bf3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Ed Felton & Offchain Labs X: https://x.com/EdFelten X: https://x.com/OffchainLabs ✅ Follow Illia Polosukhin & Near Protocol X: https://x.com/ilblackdragon X: https://x.com/NEARProtocol ✅ 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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Ali Serag and Bohao Tang from the Flow Foundation for a hands-on deep dive into building your first AI Agent on the Flow blockchain. Learn why Flow’s unique features—including resource-oriented programming, atomic transactions, multisig account management, and capabilities—make it an ideal chain for sophisticated AI-driven dApps. Discover how AI Agents can hold wallets, communicate, and bundle transactions while securely granting granular permissions. Follow along with a practical demo using a lightweight fork of Eliza integrated with Flow. If you’re ready to push the boundaries of Web3 with AI autonomy, this workshop is a must-watch! 00:00 Intro & Agenda 00:47 What Are AI Agents? 01:26 Agent Components & Personality 02:33 Why Build AI Agents on Flow 03:41 Atomic Transactions & Bundling 04:14 Multisig & Sponsored Transactions 05:30 Flow Account Management Explained 06:28 Granular Capabilities & Permissions 07:30 Lightweight Eliza Fork Overview 09:37 Demo Setup & Repository 11:17 Environment Setup & Config 13:12 Run the Agent & Debug Mode 15:51 Agent Wallet vs. User Wallet 17:35 Flow Actions & Plugin Examples 19:23 Batched Transactions & Scripts 20:10 Practical Tips & Best Practices 21:06 Where to Ask Questions & Get Help 29:37 Pitch Training & Product-Market Fit 30:18 Good Luck Building! _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🤖 *Agentic Ethereum* Agentic Ethereum is an online, async hackathon that runs from Jan. 31 to Feb. 12, 2025. With over $175,000 USD in prizes, Agentic Ethereum is a great way to dive into the world of autonomous AI agents and explore how they can revolutionize projects on Ethereum. Start the year with groundbreaking innovation! Watch the full playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh7jxP_flgRf5nZ_WDgFpBy3&si=RZozbd9C5KrG6Bf3 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ *Follow Ali Serag* X: https://x.com/AliSerag0 ✅ *Follow Flow Foundation* X: https://x.com/flow_blockchain ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Uma Roy

ETHGlobal · Oct 9, 2025

Join Uma Roy, Co-Founder and CEO of Succinct Labs, at Pragma Denver 2025 to explore how Prover Networks will power the next era of ZK rollups, verifiable computing, and scalable blockchains. Discover why ZK proofs are uniquely suited for decentralized physical infrastructure, how SP1 makes zero-knowledge computation easy with just “normal code,” and how Succinct’s upcoming Prover Network aims to align cryptoeconomic incentives between supply-side GPU providers and demand-side rollups, L2 chains, and more. If you’re curious about the exponential growth of ZK performance, or how decentralized auctions and specialized hardware will drive down costs for verifiable computation, this talk dives into the future of unstoppable Web3 scaling. 00:00 Introduction & Transition to Prover Networks 00:59 Background: Large-Scale Compute Buildouts (Bitcoin, AI) 02:15 ZK as the Next Big Compute Paradigm 03:00 Introducing SP1: Making ZK VM Development Easy 04:08 Demand for ZK Proofs: Rollups & Beyond 05:42 Comparing ZK to Economic Security & Scaling 07:00 Why a Decentralized Prover Network? Self-Verification 08:23 The “Prover” Role & Supply-Side Market 09:32 Auction Mechanism for Pricing ZK Proofs 10:40 Succinct Labs’ Testnet: Real-World Proof Generation 12:06 Global GPU Clusters & Future Specialized Hardware 13:14 Full Vision of the Succinct Prover Network 14:51 Roadmap: Open Prover Phase & Mainnet Launch 16:03 ZK Performance: Exponential Gains & Specialized ASICs 17:44 Summary: Prover Networks as Critical Blockchain Infrastructure 19:21 Conclusion & Thank You _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *Pragma Denver* Pragma Denver 2025 was held on February 25th at ReelWorks in Denver, Colorado and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Denver YouTube Playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXzKMXK2aHh6mvMfVn2gIK2uhRiTHjIg9&si=Xyozrbw0ZvUW_65a 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 Uma Roy* X: https://x.com/pumatheuma ✅ Follow *Succinct Labs* X: https://x.com/succinctlabs ✅ *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

Join Ram Kumar, Co-Founder of Openledger, at Pragma Denver 2025 for a deep dive into why specialized AI models are the future, and why broad “general” language models alone aren’t enough to power advanced Web3 agents. Discover how fine-tuned adapters, domain-specific datasets, and decentralized infrastructure enable AI solutions to be more accurate, proactive, and scalable—ranging from DeFi intelligence and specialized programming assistants to code-auditing agents. Ram showcases how Open Ledger helps data contributors and builders collaborate, monetize, and ensure proof of attribution on-chain. If you’re ready to move beyond generic chatbots and leverage AI models tailored to your niche, this is your roadmap to building next-generation Web3 agents. 00:00 Introduction & Talk Overview 00:13 The Rise of AI & Everyday Applications 01:30 Why Web3 Cares About Specialized AI 02:43 General Models vs. Specialized Models 03:18 Current State of Agents in Web3 04:24 The Road to Proactive, Autonomous Agents 05:00 Building Specialized Models on Open Ledger 06:19 Data Contributors & Tokenized Model Proposals 07:29 Fine-Tuning Workflow & Lora Adapters 08:37 Model Evaluation & Chat Testing 09:20 Deployment with Open Lora Framework 10:15 Proof of Attribution & Rewards for Data 11:02 Real-World Use Cases & Future Vision 11:41 YouTube Analogy & Conclusion _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇺🇸 *Pragma Denver* Pragma Denver 2025 was held on February 25th at ReelWorks in Denver, Colorado and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Denver 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 Ram Kumar* X: https://x.com/Ramkumartweet ✅ Follow *Openledger* X: https://x.com/OpenledgerHQ ✅ *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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _