ETHDenver has always been a place where the industry takes its own temperature. This year, we arrived with a clear intention: not to broadcast, but to convene. Here’s a quick recap.
War room: a tactical guide on how a team prepares for launch
Featuring Ellie Davidson (Espresso), Bruno Faviero (Magna), and Corinne Struck (Kraken 360), moderated by Munam Wasi of the Ink Foundation
The morning kicked off with a live announcement: Payward has acquired Magna, and Magna will be deeply integrated with Kraken. It set an immediate tone for the session. This wasn’t a theoretical panel about token launches. The conversation opened by exploring what that kind of integration actually changes for teams preparing to go live, and what stays exactly the same.
From there, the panel worked through the decisions that define a launch before it happens. The first was strategic clarity: when you sit down to plan a launch, what are the two or three outcomes you’re actually optimizing for, and what are you explicitly not optimizing for? Trying to win on every dimension at once is how you end up with a launch that’s technically live but strategically incoherent.
On token design, the question the panel kept returning to was deceptively simple: who is this token for, and how do they get it? A token that rewards the wrong behavior at launch doesn’t just create a short-term problem. It embeds the wrong incentives into the network from Day One, and those are hard to unwind. The discussion got into how you design distribution to reward the right people, and how you recognize and avoid the patterns that produce a launch spike followed by a slow bleed.
The operational side of launch prep got its own moment too. What are the must-have systems and routines in the weeks before you go live, so you’re not making critical decisions on the fly? The panel was candid about where teams tend to feel the hardest tradeoffs: moving fast versus staying flexible, and both of those versus protecting the long-term health of the network.
The session closed with a question every founder in the room needed to hear: what should you decide earlier, and what should you stop overthinking? The answers were practical and direct, and the throughline was that most teams spend too long deliberating on things that are recoverable, and not long enough on the ones that aren’t.
Scaling without surprises: the decisions that hold up past launch
Featuring Katya Ternopolska (Sentora), Val Gui (xStocks), Colton Conley (Arrington Capital), and Matt Immerso (Blockchange Ventures), moderated by Nick Santomauro of Kraken
If the War Room panel was about preparing to launch, this one was about what happens after, when the harder work of staying alive begins.
The panel opened with a question that reframes how most teams think about growth: what does “ready to grow” actually mean? Not ready to announce, not ready to demo, but ready to handle 10x more activity without the wheels coming off. The conversation pushed on what signal you actually trust when you’re making that call, and which signals look good but can be misleading.
From there, the discussion turned to the decisions that paid off over time, the ones that kept compounding as projects grew. The patterns that emerged weren’t the flashy ones. They were the boring infrastructure choices: the ones that made integrations easier later, reduced fire drills, and meant that when things went wrong (and they do), teams weren’t starting from scratch. The “boring decision that saved us later” theme ran through nearly every example.
The investor lens added a useful layer. Across portfolios, the most common early upgrades that make growth smoother tend to cluster around a few areas: clear ownership and escalation paths, dashboards that tell you what’s actually happening (not just what you hope is happening), compliance and security hygiene that avoids painful rewrites, and the one or two early hires that change a team’s ability to scale. These things feel like overhead until suddenly they’re the only thing standing between you and a very bad week.
The distribution conversation was particularly sharp. Going from early adopters to a real audience exposes every assumption you made about onboarding, UX, and partner readiness. Platform constraints, custody, compliance, regional access: these aren’t problems you can solve reactively at scale. The teams that handle growth well tend to be the ones who named an accountable owner for each of those problems before the volume arrived, not after.
The session closed the same way the War Room did: what should you decide earlier, and what should you stop overthinking? After a full panel of pattern recognition, the answers landed with a bit more weight.
Launching into 2026: what still matters when the cycle turns
Featuring Stephen McKeon (Collab & Currency), Maria Shen (Electric Capital), Mason Nystrom (Pantera Capital), and Rob Schmultz (Blockchange Ventures), moderated by Calvin Leyon, Head of Onchain at Kraken
The final panel pulled back to the longest time horizon of the day. The conversation moved away from tactical execution and toward a bigger question: what do investors actually believe in 2026, and how does that shape what they fund?
The panel opened with what investors are really underwriting when they back a team today. The bar has moved since 2021. There’s now a whole category of “good story that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny,” and the discussion was honest about what table stakes look like now versus then, and what common founder narratives tend to fall apart when you push on them.
From there, the conversation zoomed out to fundamentals: when the market mood changes, what actually predicts which projects endure and which fade? The clearest signal isn’t what a team does when things are exciting. It’s what they do when they aren’t. That’s where you see whether a product has real pull or just narrative momentum. The panel also dug into which cycle-driven tactics tend to age poorly, and why.
The long-term thesis conversation was one of the more candid parts of the day. Each investor was pushed to articulate something they’re conviction-led on, not a narrative, but a structural shift in user behavior or market infrastructure they believe is inevitable over a 5 to 10 year horizon. The “why now in 2026, not 2021” framing was a useful corrective to the tendency to recycle old theses with updated branding.
The panel closed with how all of that shows up in practice: how thesis shapes diligence, what investors actually do after they’re in (hiring, partnerships, governance, compliance readiness), and how launch structures have matured since the 2021 era. Less spray-and-pray, more sequencing. Fewer surprises, clearer expectations, better readiness checks.
The final question, what’s one thing every founder should ask a potential investor, produced some of the best answers of the day. The consensus: ask how they show up when things are hard, not when things are exciting. Anyone can be a good partner in a bull market.
Three panels, one throughline
Three different entry points into the same underlying question: how do you build something that lasts?
What struck us across all three conversations was the consistency of the answer. It’s not a secret, and it’s not cycle-specific. It’s the same discipline that has always separated the teams who make it from the ones who don’t: clarity on what you’re building, honesty about what you’re not ready for, and the willingness to make the boring decisions early so they’re not crises later.
We were proud to convene these conversations at ETHDenver with the Ink Foundation, and even more proud to have the people on our team who can have them.
We’ll see you next time.
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