Wall Street Came to Singapore, and It Brought Its DeFi Résumé 📄

TOKEN2049 Singapore is set for October 7–8, 2026, with a speaker lineup that places executives from Nasdaq, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Morgan Stanley directly on the same bill as operators from Hyperliquid, Solana, Polygon, Base, and Ethereum-related projects. The conference agenda frames institutional DeFi and on-chain market infrastructure as central themes of this year's program.

The published 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 alongside crypto-native firms across the two-day schedule. On the builder side, the program lists 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, alongside executives associated with Aave, Ethena, Synthetix, StarkWare, and Offchain Labs.

The institutional-DeFi overlap is made explicit in 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 on stage as part of the broader program, which spans DeFi applications, blockchain networks, and scaling infrastructure. Organizers have not yet released detailed session times or venue floor plans beyond the October 7–8 window in Singapore, and the official site continues to list the same roster as the source for all named participants.