Welcome & Introduction

Transcript

Good morning, everybody. My name is Kartik. I'm one of the co-founders of E Global. I want to welcome all of you to Eth Conf. Now, this is a conference. And in fact, this is the biggest conference in America focused entirely on showcasing what's happening in the world of Ethereum. At E Global, we're used to being in rooms where this technology is actually made. From late-night hackathons to fund demos becoming protocols to fun ideas becoming standards and seeing a small group of people invent infrastructure that becomes pretty crucial to our space. That's kind of been the setting we're used to.

And for many years, especially from doing this thing for a decade, we've always wondered and been curious about the question, is this actually something people care about or will this be ready? Will this be able to support what we want people to do on this? And more and more, the question has become how fast can we move? And that's the exact change that made us get excited about running this whole conference. More and more, we're seeing businesses institutions and companies outside of our own ecosystem ask and integrate this entire stack.

And that's the motivation behind doing Eth Conf. It's intentionally institutional, proudly American, and centered in a place where we see the best of digital assets with the best of finance. Right here in New York, where we we believe this should be. This entire audience and this entire room is an incredible set of people. There's so many of you are here. Some of you have been builders of Ethereum for many years.

Some of you co-founded Ethereum that are in this room. Uh there are people who are casually managing billions of dollars on balance sheets trying to see how they can integrate stablecoins and everything in between. There are founders of DeFi protocols that are bigger than most banks just hanging out. And there's at least one person who told me they're here because their boss told them to report back on what the crypto people are doing. So, we're excited to have all of you here no matter where you're coming from or what industry you work on on a day-to-day basis.

This is the place where we want to welcome all of you to really understand what's happening in our little ecosystem. I'm sure a lot of you've been to many conferences. You know kind of how things work, so I'm not going to bore you with the details of keeping your badge on or making sure you have your wristband on and we won't give you or forcing you to download our app, which it's 2026, you don't need to download things. This works on the website. Just go and find people, connect with them directly on the website. And I'm not also going to talk about all the things that we have planned that our incredible team put for all of you for the next 3 days, especially the co-working thing where you can just hang out and get some work done.

But I will make you thank our incredible sponsors. They kind of made this event possible. You're going to see a lot of them outside talking to you. And for their support, please give them a big round of applause. Now, one of the things that made us do this event was releasing a gap on how we saw what was being communicated by just the general ecosystem, whether it's through other events or what we saw in the news.

And the goal for the next 3 days for us is to focus on these three key themes. Uh these are not going to be sectioned by day. You're going to see a mix of all of this every day in all stages. But a big part of what this whole event's going to be about is the institutional side of the world. You're going to hear from people who are actually integrating these things and talking about what they're doing and how you can actually see things. We're going to have a good focus on how Ethereum the protocol is evolving, including applications and other protocols on top of it. So you get to understand what technological improvements become easier, what things become cheaper, faster, what the missing pieces are, when do we expect to see those changes,

directionally how is this protocol changing? And all those things are going to tie in to being on chain at scale. That's going to cover everything from what is missing to get to millions of transactions per second to almost free transactions everywhere so everybody can use. Whether it's humans sending money to each other or agents, we're going to cover a full spectrum of practically where we are. And this exactly is the curation that is going to be the big piece for the next 3 days. The three important things that I want you to take away from this whole event is that what you're going to see on stage, whether it's here or in the other room,

is going to be on real stuff. What does that mean? It means that a speaker is not going to be on stage if they have not shipped what they're working on. You will see things that are actually live, things you can use, things that you can go back and reference, and not just ideas that may or may not come to life. We took a lot of time to curate an amazing group of people. So especially if you're on the institutional side, you get to meet a lot of the founders in our ecosystem from startups to big protocols. They're just hanging out. They want to talk to all of you. And they want to make sure that they get to explain anywhere from the nuances to what they're excited about and how you may be able to work together.

And when you bring those two groups together, you get effectively a lot of decision makers in the room where you cut through a lot of fluff, you get to talk to the right person immediately, and their support team are also just here making sure that everybody gets the outcomes and the ideas that they are trying to get done. Ultimately, we want this event to be a place where you get to shape what's happening in our space and really help us understand what the missing pieces are. There are not a lot of events that have a good mix of developers and people who are integrating it on the financial side.

And we really want to make sure this is the place where you see clearly how we can simplify linking these groups together. Now, that's everything I wanted to talk to you about on how the whole week is set up. We're going to have a lot of people share their versions of what they see in the space come on today. All these people are just here on the main stage. Another set of people are on the other stage with me as well. But, you get to see all of this on our website. You can follow the schedule.

You can get notified of various talks and a lot of them will hang out here after to talk to you and learn more. I'm not going to go through every speaker here, but we're going to just jump right into our very first talk for today.