ETHConf Recap: Ethereum’s institutional era comes into focus

New York, July 9, 2026 – The inaugural ETHConf wrapped weeks ago at the Javits Center, and the arguments it started are still running. Over three days, the ETHGlobal-presented conference put 150+ speakers from more than 100 companies on stage, including BlackRock, DTCC, Swift, Coinbase, the SEC, Consensys, Aave, and Uniswap. Most sessions circled the same questions: how stablecoins scale, what moves onchain next, and what institutions need before they commit.

“More and more, we’re seeing businesses, institutions and companies outside of our own ecosystem ask and integrate this entire stack,” ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar said in his opening remarks. “The question has become how fast can we move.”

Ethereum Foundation protocol lead Tim Beiko opened the keynotes with a harder question: “If Ethereum can work at planetary scale, what should we use the protocol for?” Ethereum, he argued, “has to provide the world with things that it needs but cannot get elsewhere.”

Stablecoins move into financial infrastructure

“The future of money is on digital networks,” said former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo, who called Ethereum “one of the principal networks that is functioning, working well, building, upgrading.” With digital asset legislation moving through Washington, no topic filled more sessions.

Rain CEO Farooq Malik showed stablecoin payments riding existing Visa and Mastercard rails while settling onchain, and Coinbase Chief Business Officer Shan Aggarwal and Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi mapped what those rails still need: custody, trading infrastructure, and payments that hold up at scale.

Institutional standards take priority

BlackRock applies “a very high bar” before building an iShares product around any asset, said Robbie Mitchnick, the firm’s global head of digital assets. “Is this thing mature enough? Is it at scale in terms of market cap and liquidity?” Ethereum, in other words, now gets measured like any other financial infrastructure.

Blunter still was DTCC’s Johnna Powell: “We absolutely need each other.” Wall Street’s clearinghouse brings “scale and risk management and regulatory relationships and trust built up with Wall Street over the last fifty years,” she said, while the Ethereum community brings “openness, composability, developer velocity.”

The money at stake, said Tom Zschach, Swift’s former chief innovation officer, is “the largest fee pool in all of global finance”: capital formation. “Tokenization is actually changing every aspect of it. Issuance, secondary trading, the custodial businesses, the asset servicing, it’s all changing.”

Tokenization expands beyond traditional users

The biggest product news came from Consensys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, who introduced MetaMask’s agent wallet, built so AI agents can hold assets, make payments, and transact onchain. His forecast ran one line: “Tokenization is going to move everything onchain.”

Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo laid out why issuers keep coming: tokenized funds pay daily dividends, trade peer-to-peer around the clock, and work as DeFi collateral. Once that is normal, he said, “the investor demand will move from the traditional assets into the tokenized assets.”

DeFi demonstrates market scale

DeFi brought receipts: more than $1 trillion in cumulative loans and $3.5 trillion in cumulative deposits through Aave, per founder Stani Kulechov, and over $1 trillion in annual trading volume on Uniswap, per founder Hayden Adams.

Public companies are moving too. Bitmine COO and CFO Young Kim made the case for Ethereum as a treasury asset, and Bit Digital CEO Sam Tabar described his firm’s pivot from Bitcoin mining to an Ethereum treasury and staking strategy, plus Ethereum-backed financing for its AI infrastructure buildout.

Policy discussions become more concrete

“I think we are at this perfect inflection point,” said Taylor Lindman, chief counsel of the SEC Crypto Task Force, pointing to “a lot more clarity brought into the market on what role the securities laws have to play in crypto and in onchain environments.” His sharper line: “Blockchains really work best when they are neutral infrastructure.”

Watch the ETHConf sessions

Every ETHConf session is now live on the ETHGlobal YouTube channel.

ETHConf returns to New York City in June 2027. Early bird passes are on sale now at ethconf.com.

About ETHConf

ETHConf is a conference focused entirely on Ethereum and its role in finance, technology, policy, and digital infrastructure. Presented by ETHGlobal, ETHConf brings together founders, builders, institutions, investors, regulators, and industry leaders shaping the future of Ethereum.

About ETHGlobal

ETHGlobal organizes hackathons and events for the Ethereum ecosystem and has supported developers and founders building on Ethereum for nearly a decade.

Media contact
Annelisa Moody
Marketing Lead, ETHGlobal
annelisa@ethglobal.com