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Ahmed Barakat
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TOKEN2049 Singapore is scheduled for October 7–8, 2026, with confirmed speakers from Nasdaq, BlackRock, and Franklin Templeton appearing alongside executives from Hyperliquid, Solana, Polygon, Base, and Ethereum-related projects. The agenda points to institutional DeFi and on-chain market infrastructure as central themes.
The official speaker roster names Adena Friedman, Nasdaq Chair and CEO; Nikhil Sharma, BlackRock Director of Digital Assets; Jenny Johnson, Franklin Templeton CEO; and Amy Oldenburg, Morgan Stanley Head of Digital Asset Strategy. Their listed roles put traditional financial firms directly alongside crypto-native operators on the event program.
On the builder side, the roster includes Jeff Yan of Hyperliquid Labs, Jesse Pollak of Base, Lily Liu of the Solana Foundation, Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon Foundation, and Joseph Lubin under Ethereum and MetaMask. It also lists executives associated with Aave, Ethena, Synthetix, StarkWare, and Offchain Labs, spanning DeFi applications, blockchain networks, and scaling infrastructure.
The program makes that overlap explicit with a session titled “DeFi’s Institutional Breakthrough,” featuring Aave Labs’ Stani Kulechov, Ethena Labs’ Guy Young, and Infinex/Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, with a16z crypto’s Robbie Petersen moderating.
A separate Hyperliquid session places the derivatives-focused platform’s CEO, Jeff Yan, on the main stage. These listings are evidence of a discussion agenda.
As financial firms assess on-chain products, custody, execution, and operational controls remain part of the infrastructure question. Those considerations are distinct from the protocols themselves and are central to how institutional key custody and execution fit into on-chain finance.
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TOKEN2049 Singapore Official Agenda Emphasizes DeFi and Market Design
The October 7 schedule begins with Welcome to TOKEN2049 Singapore on the OKX Main Stage from 9:00 to 9:10 a.m. Balaji Srinivasan’s “The Open Source Network State” keynote follows from 9:10 to 9:30 a.m., before the agenda turns to investment, decentralized finance, and trading infrastructure.
“DeFi’s Institutional Breakthrough” is listed on the OKX Main Stage from 10:20 to 11:00 a.m. The next main-stage session, Hyperliquid: Rebuilding Finance from First Principles, runs from 11:00 to 11:35 a.m. Elsewhere, the visible schedule includes Wall St. 2049: Everything Trades, Nobody Sleeps, The New Trilemma: Confidential, Compliant, Composable, and Onchain Options, Derivatives and the US Market.
The range is notable: privacy and compliance sit alongside derivatives and always-on trading, while the institutional DeFi panel asks how established financial participants might engage with on-chain markets. The agenda also includes a dedicated October 8 gathering, TOKEN2049 Institutional, described by its organizers as a private, invitation-based event for senior leaders across global finance and digital assets.
Hyperliquid’s appearance also reflects the growing overlap between crypto trading venues and professional market infrastructure. The platform is the subject of a scheduled discussion, while separate reporting has examined Hyperliquid data in Bloomberg Terminal; neither fact, by itself, confirms a commercial relationship between the firms represented at the conference.
Tokenization is another thread running through the institutional-finance conversation. Moving securities onto blockchain rails could change how assets are issued and traded.
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