The 4th Annual 3MO After Hours at Consensus Miami brought together the top leaders of our industry for a night of epic conversations and networking. Special thanks to our partner @moonpay for helping make the evening memorable💜

We had so many amazing side events at Consensus 2026. One highlight was with our partner @Celo as they, @Stablecoin & @minipay took over an iconic sunset location at Soho House. Take a look 👇

Some personal takeaways from @consensus2026 in Miami last week: - I have attended and spoken at every single Consensus event for the past decade (except one in Toronto) and this was by far the one with the most TradFi presence. Lots of TradFi attending for the first time to learn about crypto and TradFi firms trying to showcase their crypto initiatives. Even JP Morgan had a booth. And this is in a long bear market. - Main topics of discussions that stood out were stablecoins, RWAs and agentic crypto payments and all the related topics from adoption to compliance. - the U.S. is clearly open for crypto. In addition to the regulatory and policy catalysts, the crypto firms (mainly U.S. based) and banks (from GSIBs to regionals) are spending tremendously with services providers from law firms and Big 4 to tech and infrastructure providers thus catalyzing a bigger buzz. - challenges remain including hack and exploits risks (ie North Korea), compliance challenges (eg no likely enforcement for the next two years in the U.S.) and crypto becoming politicized (eg Trump family activities). And we are in the middle of a bad bear market which has a massive negative impact on everything. Congrats to @mikelaujr and the entire Consensus team for another successful event.

Midnight at @consensus2026 Miami 🌴 The signal from Miami was clear: the industry wants privacy that’s practical, programmable, and built for real-world use. That’s what Midnight is solving. Huge thank you to everyone who stopped by the booth, joined a session, tuned into the podcasts, and helped make the week unforgettable.

Proud of our impressive presence at @CoinDesk’s @consensus2026 Miami last week The @Grayscale team spent time with the partners, protocols, and innovators actively building the digital asset economy Coming together from across the ecosystem is what drives our industry forward

Under the Stars with @StJude x NOLCHA at @consensus2026 by @CoinDesk ✨ 🌴The Official Closing Night ended the conference on a high note, celebrating all your hard work! Leaders across crypto, blockchain & institutional finance came together for an evening of art, live performances, music & meaningful conversations under the stars 🌙 Thank you to our partners, artists & community for making this night so special. ✨ @XDCNetwork | @BitGo | @spaceandtime | @Luminsea_world | @Cardano | @DiscoCatCom | @shefiorg Photo recap below 🎥 Take part of the night back home with you: Interested in purchasing featured artwork from the event? DM us 📩

Just got back from @consensus2026 Miami. Some unfiltered thoughts on the vibes: The industry has clearly grown up. The degens are gone, the allocators are wearing suits, and your @Uniswap booth has been replaced by a JP Morgan activation with 50 year old boomers. Cautiously optimistic with a distinctly institutional aftertaste. This was not a bull market conference. Key takeaways: 1) CLARITY Act has serious momentum. Everyone at the conference basically agrees it's getting done before summer. The urgency is real, people are done waiting. And the regulatory window feels genuinely unprecedented: CLARITY Act, GENIUS Act, a CFTC chair actively engaging with the industry, this combination has never existed simultaneously before. The institutional urgency you're seeing everywhere is directly correlated to this window feeling time-limited. Miss it and you're explaining to your board why you sat on your hands during the most favorable crypto regulatory environment in history. 2) Institutions are not dabbling anymore. They are ALL IN on tokenization and terrified of missing it. No one is debating whether blockchain rails are useful. The debate is now who gets the mandate. And quietly @coinbase , @krakenfx , @RobinhoodApp and @Bullish and others are being seen more as competitors than potential partners by a lot of these TradFi players. 3) TradFi M&A is going to keep ripping. @krakenfx just grabbed Reap for $600M. Visa, Mastercard, Swift etc they can't miss the train and they're willing to overpay for the ticket. 4) Crypto VC is consolidating fast. @a16z and @katie_haun just announced $2.2B and $1B funds respectively. Meanwhile the boutique VCs are either pivoting to AI or quietly closing shop. Same playbook is happenign as traditional VC, the big platforms eat everything and the small guys scramble. Seed and pre-seed is basically a ghost town right now. Late stage and pre-IPO is where the action is. 5) Investment themes were aggressively consensus (no pun intended): Stablecoins, tokenization, vertically integrated neo-banks, regulated or permissioned DeFi. Literally everyone is trying to be a tokenization platform. Issuance, management, settlement, curation, pick your lane, slap tokenization on it, try to raise money. 6) Building in crypto is genuinely hard now. Your competition isn't some scrappy new L1 or GMX, it's @tether , @Anchorage , and @Securitize. there are now many crypto businesses running 200M+ annual Rev with serious management teams and deep pockets. The barbarians are now the establishment. New entrants are going to have a very bad time. 7) Pure token-only plays have become extremely contrarian. Controversial take but I think the biggest returns will come from a handful of tokens that can credibly signal in a compliant way that the token remains the only value accruing asset going forward. 8) A lot of teams are in a genuinely weird spot on the token/equity dynamics. Decent products, decent teams, but a complete stakeholder clusterf*** that nobody can untangle. Many of these will simply not survive. 9) The agentic finance and agentic commerce crowd was loud. The actual substance was not. A lot of big claims, very little to show for it. Feels very early and mostly vibes. Color me skeptical for now. 10) @Bullish acquiring Equinity for $4.2B was the boldest move of the conference. @ThomasFarley and @BonannoDavid now have a full-stack RWA proposition: issuance, transfer agency, tokenization, exchange and settlement under one roof. Massive move. Very positive for the industry regardless of whether you think the price or the move were right. 11) @BitMNR and @fundstrat are apparently tired of winning and has decided to let your grandma keep her ETH... for now. The pace of accumulation is slowing. Tom, we await your next allocation with bated breath. 12) DeFi apps are moving up the stack and getting smarter about it. They don't want to be the commodity infrastructure layer getting squeezed by exchanges that own distribution. Some genuinely interesting announcements, @buffalu__ at @jito_sol launching JTX being the highlight. 13) Nobody at the conference was talking about retail coming back. The entire conversation was institutional. That's either a sign of maturity or a sign that the industry has quietly given up on mainstream consumer adoption for now and is betting the next cycle gets pulled by institutional flows rather than retail FOMO. Probably both. 14) The L1 debate is officially dead. Nobody and I mean nobody was arguing SOL vs ETH or pitching their shiny new L1. The crowd that used to religiously defend their chain of choice has either grown up, cashed out, or both. Institutions don't care about your consensus mechanism. They care about settlement finality, compliance rails and liquidity. The L1 wars were fun while they lasted. RIP. 15) DATs are a mess. Had some genuinely productive conversations with a few of them but let's be honest most are an absolute clusterf*** operationally and very few are running anything resembling a legitimate business. The structure is a disaster at the stakeholder level and the governance makes your average startup cap table look clean. That said, the permanent capital vehicle concept is still genuinely compelling and I think a handful of these will turn out to be absolute home runs. The model isn't broken, most of the teams just are. Bottom line: Consensus 2026 felt like the moment crypto stopped being a movement and started being an industry. Whether that's exciting or depressing probably depends on when you got in.

On the plane home from Consensus. Exhausted. But in a good way. ✈️ This week I met BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Jane Street. The people building RWAs and payments infrastructure. The regulators, lawyers and even competitors who will shape how Bitget operates in the US. 8am to 11pm. About 10 deep meetings per day. Here’s the one thing I’ll say before I share the details: The conversation has shifted. Completely. Nobody’s talking about another public chain, NFTs, or GameFi anymore. It’s all RWA. Stablecoin payments. Regulation & Clarity Act. Tokenized equities. @consensus2026 made that undeniable. Unpacking everything soon. Stay tuned 👇

Consensus Miami 2026 has been awesome! I got so much work done in one week and really glad I got on the plane in the last minute to come by. Bear market conferences are the best as it’s the best time to connect with fellow crypto leaders to collaborate further. One notable presence at this conference are the suits. Crypto is maturing and the institutions are here. After many years of advocating for institutions to come, we finally have them here. They still move slowly, but many of the TradFi firms now have crypto teams and are actively looking at tokenization and how they can adopt blockchain technology. The people attending Consensus Miami are very different from the Asia based conferences that I usually attend. Very distinct US crowd and is a fantastic place for any BD work generally, and especially useful to meet institutional clients If I have to pick only 2 conferences to attend in a year, I will choose Consensus Miami to meet US folks and Token2049 Singapore to meet Asia folks. See you all at the next conference! I now have hundreds of emails and Slack notifications to get back to…

That's a wrap on the Agentic Track at the @easya_app + @consensus2026 hackathon in Miami! 3 days. 5 finalists onstage. 3 winning teams shipping agents that discover, pay, and execute on @base via x402 + AWS. Meet the winners ↓

To everyone who joined @CoinDesk in Miami, and everyone who should have, here is a special announcement from @Bullish CEO @ThomasFarley: 🌴 Consensus Miami • May 4–6, 2027 🗽 Consensus New York City • May 9–11, 2028

Just wrapped Consensus and basically all I heard was stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins from banks, payment cos, fintechs & enterprises all trying to use stablecoins (better money!) to make their products better, biz more profitable & ops simpler. Plus so many great people!

Managed to spend some time at the main @consensus2026 conference this week as well. Honestly, if you missed it this year, I’d highly recommend making the trip next time around. Between Miami being the city it is, all the side events throughout the week like Pudgy Penguins, OKX, private meet ups/dinners, and the overall networking, It ended up being one of the strongest event weeks I’ve experienced in a long time.

My main observation is that the level of technical, political and substantive discussion meaningfully improved at Consensus this year. Less vibes, less tourists. More people genuinely trying to chart the future.

It’s been my first time to Consensus Miami. Such an eventful week. - Recorded five episodes. - Went on stage at the main conference twice. - Joined several quality side-events to network & speak at those. First time for the team to be recording episodes for @new_era_finance in the US. To be honest, I can’t be more bullish about the entire industry and the quality of our team. The conference was well organized, with quality speakers and great hospitality. All side-events were nearby and the people I met have been great folks almost everytime. Despite the fact that we’re in the middle of a bear market, it felt far from one. It might not feel like we’re expanding as an ecosystem, but on the other hand it starts to feel like #crypto# has found its product-market fit. Whether it’s tokenization, AI agents, stablecoins, trading or DeFi, it’s all building up to unlock the next phase of adoption.

That’s a wrap @consensus2026! 9 years ago I worked behind the scenes at my first Consensus in NY. This week I hosted it. Full circle. 🙏 @ThomasFarley @mikelaujr and the entire @CoinDesk team & everyone backstage — you never see how hard these people work. Thank you.

The next evolution of capital markets is here. @Bullish CEO @ThomasFarley speaks on the company's decision to be the first U.S.-listed company to tokenize its entire cap table.