Here’s a look at what we got up to.
Mainstage and summit appearances
We had four speakers on the program across EthCC’s main conference and the adjacent RWA Summit, a concentration that reflects where our thinking is focused at the moment.
Monday opened with Magna CEO Bruno Faviero’s panel titled “Future of Money” featuring Zerion and Cap Money. They discussed the future of onchain yield-bearing assets, and whether more growth would come from crypto-native assets or vaults that bring traditional finance assets onchain.
Later that afternoon, Kraken General Manager of xStocks Val Gui returned to the same stage with “Don’t Build Trading Venues. Build Onchain Capital Markets,” a talk that drew a sharp distinction between the exchange model the industry has defaulted to and what a genuinely open, programmable capital markets layer could look like.
Since Kraken’s acquisition of xStocks parent company Backed, the xStocks platform has grown to over 100 tokenized stocks and ETFs, while surpassing $25 billion in total transaction volume, cementing its position as the world’s largest provider of tokenized equities.
On Tuesday, Val took that thread further at the RWA Summit with “Approaches and Learnings from Tokenized Equities”, drawing on Kraken’s work in the space to walk through what’s actually hard about bringing real-world assets onchain and what the path forward looks like in practice.
That same afternoon, Noid took the Burton Stage for “Cooking With GASS: A Developer-Friendly Airdrop Mechanism,” a tight breakdown of a mechanism designed to make token distribution more thoughtful and less chaotic for the teams building on top of it.
All four talks are a fair representation of where we’re spending our energy: less on what crypto could eventually become, more on what builders can ship today.
Hackathon
The Kraken hackathon ran Tuesday through Thursday at the Carlton, wrapping up Thursday afternoon ahead of the afterparty. Fifty-four participants across 17 teams had roughly 55 hours to build, and the output was strong enough that the judging panel split prizes across six winners rather than the standard podium.
The top three went to xPrime (first), Stretch by Spreads (second), and xStream (third). A $10,000 discretionary prize was split three ways between Paragon, Castar/Aura, and Otomato, teams whose projects the panel felt warranted recognition beyond the ranked placings.
The hackathon closed out with the Code to Coast afterparty at Lucia Beach on Thursday evening, a low-key wind-down that gave participants and Kraken team members a chance to debrief somewhere with better views than a hotel conference room.
Side events
Outside the main conference, we hosted three intimate gatherings that reflected different corners of what we’re building.
Tuesday evening brought the Ink event, Proof of Liquidity, drawing around 250 people for a focused conversation on liquidity infrastructure and what Ink’s architecture makes possible. Wednesday morning was a smaller-format Magna Brunch, followed that evening by a Listings Dinner. All three were at capacity, and the conversations were exactly the kind that don’t happen on a main stage.
Until next time
EthCC has always been a conference for people who are actually building, which is why it continues to matter. This year, between the talks, the hackathon output, and the side events, we came away with a stronger conviction that the onchain capital markets thesis isn’t speculative anymore: teams are executing on it, and we intend to keep making that easier. See you next year.
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