Gregg Bell has spent two decades at the intersection of traditional finance and digital markets. He thinks the migration from bank account to wallet has already begun — quietly, invisibly, and faster than anyone expected.

There is a migration underway in global finance that most people have not noticed. It is happening beneath the surface, inside the systems that banks, asset managers, and central banks use to move money between each other. By the time it reaches ordinary people, the infrastructure will already be in place. The transition will feel seamless. That, at least, is the plan.

Gregg Bell, Chief Investment Officer at Hashgraph, the enterprise software company that builds on top of Hedera’s network, has had a front-row seat to every stage of this shift. He has watched it from credit hedge funds, from Wall Street trading desks, from the earliest days of crypto lending, and from inside one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges during its most turbulent years. Now he is at Proof of Talk in Paris, a summit gathering the architects of the financial infrastructure most people will one day use without knowing it exists.

“The migration from a bank account or a securities account to a wallet,” he says, “is what we are living through in real life right now.”

The road and the vehicle

To understand what that means, it helps to understand what Hedera is, and what Hashgraph does. Hedera is a public network, similar in purpose to a blockchain but built on a different underlying technology called a hashgraph. It allows transactions to settle in seconds at a fraction of a cent. While most blockchains are governed by anonymous participants Hedera is overseen by a council of some of the world’s largest corporations; Google, IBM, Boeing, FedEx, Deutsche Telekom, and McLaren among them. Each council member has an equal vote. Hashgraph is a separate but related company that builds enterprise software and deploys capital to accelerate adoption on top of that network. If Hedera is the road, Hashgraph builds the vehicles institutions use to drive on it. It also funds projects that put those vehicles into production.

Two decades at the border

Bell’s career did not follow a straight line to this point. He started at Silver Point Capital, a multi-billion dollar credit hedge fund, before moving to the Royal Bank of Scotland as a trader and investment banker in structured products. He then joined ArrowMark Partners, another multi-billion dollar hedge fund, where he focused on investment analysis and trading. From there, he co-founded A3 Financial Investments, building out its asset management business, and Salt Blockchain, where he served as both Chief Investment Officer and Chief Operating Officer. He helped pioneer the crypto-backed lending market at a time when the concept was genuinely novel. A stint leading growth at Binance during its most turbulent years followed. And now this.

The through-line, he says, has always been the same: finding where the inefficiencies are and building the infrastructure to remove them.

The foundations are being laid now

What is easy to miss from the outside is that this migration is not theoretical. It is not a roadmap or a whitepaper. It is happening in production, at some of the largest financial institutions in the world. It’s just not happening yet in a way that touches ordinary customers.

In the UK, Lloyds Banking Group and Aberdeen, one of the country’s largest asset managers, completed a trade last year that their compliance teams would have refused just two years earlier. Rather than selling investments and wiring cash to meet a routine margin requirement, the slow, expensive, traditional method, they transferred digital versions of fund units and government bonds directly, in near real-time, on Hedera. They moved collateral and settled the trade with neither side touching cash.

“The problem being solved was counterparty risk,” Bell explains. “In the past, and I’ve done this myself, back in my early investment banking days, in order to meet margin requirements, you often had to revert to cash. You’d sell out of a position, wire fiat from one bank to another. That’s a reduction in your return, and it’s a slow, cumbersome process. When you can transfer a tokenized security intraday, you’re maintaining assets in an investable, yield-bearing format while reducing counterparty risk. That’s a real value add.”

“Hedera is like the S&P 500. It provides a diversified exposure to Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries — from tech giants like Google and IBM to investment banks like Nomura, asset managers like Aberdeen, corporates like FedEx, and entertainment firms like Ubisoft.” — Gregg Bell, CIO, Hashgraph

Down under, ahead of the curve

In Australia, the Reserve Bank used HashSphere, Hashgraph’s private, invitation-only version of the Hedera network, to mint a central bank digital currency made available exclusively to its member banks. Those banks created their own tokenized deposits, backed by that central bank currency and carrying the full faith and credit of the Australian government. The banks could then service their own clients with these instruments while the details of transactions remained private. The whole system remained connected to Hedera’s public network, allowing access to broader liquidity when needed. This was Project Acacia, which ran across 2025. Its use case: settling wholesale fixed income products using tokenized deposits. Quiet, technical, and almost entirely unreported outside specialist publications.

Neither of these is a retail story. The ordinary bank customer was nowhere near either transaction. But the point Bell makes, and it is worth sitting with, is that the infrastructure being built now is the same infrastructure that retail will eventually run on. The wholesale layer always comes first.

The plumbing nobody sees

Bell is direct about what needs to happen before trades like these become routine. The technology already exists, but it requires the alignment of cost structures, service providers, and regulatory understanding within each firm’s business logic. “Once that calculus is embedded,” he says, “then we’ll see more and more collateral mobility experiments and deployments.”

The friction is not resistance

Traditional finance does not resist technology. It has adopted technology consistently and aggressively wherever it demonstrably reduces cost and risk, from electronic trading to real-time payments to algorithmic risk management. What slows adoption of blockchain infrastructure is something different and more specific: the practical complexity of aligning every part of a large institution simultaneously.

“Adoption is not just a decision from a technology department or innovation department,” Bell says. “It’s a decision throughout a variety of different executive offices, whether that’s compliance, regulatory, the finance department. All of these concerns need to be addressed.”

That process has become significantly more informed, he says, as regulation has clarified — particularly in the United States, where legal ambiguity around holding digital assets on institutional balance sheets had artificially elevated the perceived risk of adoption. As that ambiguity has reduced, institutions have been able to move from pilot projects into production deployments.

There is, however, a different kind of friction that Bell is more candid about. It comes from within the industry itself. He uses the word “tribalism” carefully but deliberately.

“Despite the industry being called Web3, it is anything but a web. It is very siloed.” — Gregg Bell, CIO, Hashgraph

The blockchain world is fragmented. Dozens of networks, each with its own architecture, its own rules, its own community, and largely, its own walls. Assets held on one network cannot easily move to another. The workarounds that exist, known as bridges, have proven dangerously vulnerable. Such concentrated pools of assets sitting in third-party systems have been drained for billions of dollars in repeated exploits. “They are contrary to the decentralisation structure of the networks themselves,” Bell says.

Building the translator

Hashgraph’s proposed answer is called CLPR, pronounced Clipper, a cross-ledger protocol currently in development that takes a different architectural approach. Instead of pooling assets in a vulnerable intermediary, it aims to enable the consensus algorithms of two different blockchain networks to communicate directly with each other. No pool. No trusted third party.

“It’s as if you rolled back the clock to the early days of the internet,” Bell says. “If Yahoo could never speak to AOL, if your emails could only send to one network — it’s less beneficial to everyone.”

Bell is clear that CLPR is still in development, not yet live. And he is careful to frame it not as a prerequisite for the migration already underway, but as something that would meaningfully accelerate it. “Assets will move from one network to another in a safe and sound manner. And that is going to lead to adoption.” He frames it explicitly as a rising tide; infrastructure that benefits every network, not just Hedera. The tribalism problem he identifies is not one that any single network can solve by competing harder. It requires the kind of shared infrastructure that nobody owns.

The corporate payment comes first

The stablecoin conversation has matured considerably in the past two years. Regulators in the US, Europe, and Australia are now treating digital versions of currencies, stablecoins, as serious payments infrastructure and no longer as mere crypto trading instruments. Shinhan Bank in South Korea has run cross-border stablecoin pilots on Hedera. Bank consortiums in the Philippines have used the network for cross-border asset movement.

Bell is specific about where he sees the clearest near-term traction: bank-to-bank cross-border payments, where fees, costs, and friction are greatest, and corporate invoice settlement, where stablecoins offer a programmable, low-cost alternative to traditional wire transfers. “What’s very clear from the institutional adoption is that stablecoins are the means by which payments for goods and services will be facilitated on a corporate level,” he says. “That to me is quite exciting — because that’s paying invoices in stablecoins.”

But he flags a problem on the horizon that receives almost no attention in mainstream coverage. If every regional bank or national bank becomes an issuer of its own tokenized deposit, the result could be a fragmentation problem at the issuer level that mirrors the fragmentation problem at the network level. A corporate holding their local bank’s tokenized dollar may find it simply not accepted elsewhere. The acceptance problem would require the equivalent of a clearing house function the industry has not yet built.

“We’re going to move from funding crypto exchanges to actually paying for goods and services with stablecoins,” he says. “But in order to do that, those assets need to be interchangeable.” The migration’s next chapter, in other words, depends on solving a problem that predates blockchain. Competing financial institutions must agree on common standards.

What the destination looks like

Proof of Talk, as an event, is a room full of people who think about this constantly. The institutions, the networks, the protocols, the compliance frameworks. Bell is asked to step back from all of it and describe what success actually looks like; not in technical terms, but in human ones.

“It’s getting in the car — or McLaren, in Hedera’s case — and driving from A to B very fast, and you’re not thinking about how, but you’re thinking about the destination and that it works.” — Gregg Bell, CIO, Hashgraph

Hedera under the hood. Invisible. Functioning. That is his definition of success.

The wallet replacing the bank account will not feel like a revolution when it happens. It will feel like the ATM replacing the bank teller, or online banking replacing the branch visit. A gradual shift in where and how people interact with their money. It will not be driven by consumer demand for new technology. The infrastructure improvements will simply make the new way easier, cheaper, and more reliable than the old one.

For those who simply want to keep using cash? “They will continue to use it, and that’s quite all right,” Bell says. “Sometimes handing someone a dollar bill might be the right tool. It’s very difficult to do across an international border that’s a different time zone away.”

The migration does not require everyone to come along at once. It just requires that when they are ready, or when the system around them has quietly shifted, the infrastructure is already there.

The post Exclusive | Gregg Bell, Hashgraph – Your Bank Account Is Becoming a Wallet appeared first on CrispyBull.

Institutional finance is moving into Web3 faster than the security infrastructure designed to protect it. Smart-contract audits are becoming licensing requirements. On-chain monitoring is no longer optional. And the attack surface, once confined to lines of code, now includes supply chains, signing keys, and in some documented cases, physical coercion.

Jason Jiang, Chief Business Officer at CertiK, sits at the center of that gap. Measured, precise, and consistently willing to say what the industry has not yet figured out; he is not the type to oversell the state of readiness.

“They Know the Importance. What They Don’t Know Is the Attack Vectors.”

The opening question is blunt by design. Institutions coming into Web3 arrive from a world of Big Four audits, SOC 2 certifications, and decades of standardized financial controls. When they look at a smart-contract audit, what are they actually buying?

“It takes a lot of education and communication, for sure,” Jiang says. “But large institutions have been preparing themselves for this kind of digital asset adaptation for years. They know the importance of smart-contract audits, chain audits, penetration testing.” He pauses. “What they’re not so sure about is the attacking vectors coming from the blockchain infrastructure. They’re not so sure about how to fix their SOPs to adapt to this new challenge. And this is where our expertise is treasured.”

It is a careful answer, acknowledging institutional readiness without overstating it. The gap, as Jiang frames it, is not knowledge of the product. It is knowledge of the threat.

The Bybit Problem

That threat has never been more visible. In February 2025, the Bybit exchange lost $1.5 billion. The smart contract was fine. The attackers compromised a third-party signing provider upstream. CertiK’s own Skynet data attributed the breach to North Korea’s TraderTraitor cluster. It remains the largest single hack in crypto history.

So what does that say about smart-contract audits as the primary security instrument for institutions?

“The height of smart-contract exploits was really the 2020 to 2023 era,” Jiang explains. “After that, attackers changed their methodology. As smart contracts got more stable and developers adopted better practices, the low-hanging fruit became social engineering, multi-signature key leakages, those kinds of things. We published a report not too long ago talking about the wrench attack, which is a physical attack.” He references the high-profile kidnapping of a crypto founder’s family member. “From the attacker’s point of view, they don’t care what methodologies they use. They’re going after the assets, and whichever gives them the easier way to do it, they will utilize that.”

The implication is sobering: auditing the code is necessary but no longer sufficient. The perimeter has expanded well beyond the contract itself.

The low-hanging fruit [for attackers] becomes social engineering, multi-signature key leakages. They don’t care what methodologies they use. They’re going after the assets.

Point-in-Time vs. Real-Time

Which raises an obvious follow-up. A smart-contract audit is, by nature, a snapshot. Protocols get upgraded. Market conditions shift. DeFi does not pause while the auditors write their report.

CertiK’s answer to this is Skynet, its on-chain monitoring platform, now integrated with CoinMarketCap and used across hundreds of projects. But Jiang is frank about its limits. “Skynet is a continuous surveillance tool. It uses live data to rate a project’s security in near-real time. But it does not solve the problem of possible vulnerabilities on its own.”

When pushed on whether institutions should think of security as a one-time exercise or an ongoing commitment, his answer is unambiguous. “It definitely needs to be ongoing. If you look at newly updated regulatory policies, they all require smart-contract audits and penetration testing as part of licensing requirements.” He adds, with a candor that is rare in this industry: “We even say it needs to be real-time. But we’re not there yet.”

The Standards Gap — and Who Fills It

The absence of a Basel III equivalent for smart-contract risk is one of the cleaner ways to articulate what institutional Web3 is still missing. Is CertiK trying to become the body that sets that standard?

“I don’t think regulators have the technical know-how yet,” Jiang says. He points to NIST in the US and Abu Dhabi Global Market as examples of standardization bodies where CertiK is already an active participant, contributing to both security measures and policy formation. “Definitely we want to be part of it, but it takes more than us alone to push out a policy, and we’re very much aware of that.”

It is a significant admission from a company that could easily claim the territory. The humility reads as strategic as much as genuine.

The Weapon That Cuts Both Ways

Then there is AI; the variable that complicates every security conversation right now. CertiK recently launched its Skill Scanner, a tool designed to identify security risks in third-party AI agent skills before they reach user data or assets. The timing is pointed: as institutions grow more cautious about AI, attackers are growing more ambitious with it. Deepfakes, automated exploit discovery, AI-assisted social engineering are all accelerating.

So is AI, on balance, a net positive or a net risk for institutional smart-contract security?

“Institutions are taking more conservative roles,” Jiang says. “They don’t want to see AI technology involvement yet.” But CertiK’s own relationship with AI is more pragmatic than that framing suggests. The Skill Scanner, it turns out, was not built for the market. It was built for CertiK. “We use so many AI skills internally and we encountered some security problems. That’s why we developed the tool. Then we gave it to the community.” A product born from self-defence, now offered as infrastructure.

It is a telling detail. If the world’s largest Web3 security firm is discovering AI vulnerabilities in its own operations and building tools to patch them, the implication for institutions running leaner security teams is uncomfortable. Jiang does not dramatize it. “AI is such a fast-evolving technology. It’s hard to predict what’s coming in a year.” Which, from a security professional, is less reassurance than it might sound.

The Question Every CFO Is Asking

The closing question is the one that matters most in any boardroom conversation about Web3 adoption: at what point is a deployment, a tokenised bond, a DeFi treasury strategy, an on-chain settlement layer, secure enough for a CFO to sign off?

Jiang does not pretend the answer is clean. “Every region has its own flavour of standardization. For instance, we started working with the Brazilian Central Bank on their requirements, and they require some of their entities to conduct a penetration test every year, and some of them are just once and done kind of thing. So I think the whole industry is still trying to figure out what’s the optimal setups there.”

But he does draw a line. “There are some must-dos. Auditing, penetration testing, on-chain monitoring, on-chain surveillance. They are some of the must-have tools or methodologies to make them get to certain levels of security.”

It is not the definitive answer institutions are hoping for. But from someone who has spent years at the intersection of enterprise operations and blockchain security, it may be the most honest one available.

The post Exclusive: CertiK’s CBO, Jason Jiang, on Why Auditing the Code Is No Longer Enough appeared first on CrispyBull.

On the second day of Proof of Talk 2026, in a corner of the Louvre Palace, its gilded halls repurposed for two days of talk about tokenization and institutional adoption, Stephan Lutz sat down and said something that stopped the conversation cold. Asked why a major institution would choose BitMEX over the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world’s most established, regulated derivatives venue, he leaned forward and said: “BitMEX is way better.” Then he explained why. And the explanation was hard to argue with.

Lutz is not a crypto native. He built his career across two decades in traditional finance: first at Deutsche Börse, the operator of Europe’s largest stock exchange, then as a senior partner at PwC leading the capital markets practice across continental Europe. The clients he advised there, the banks and clearing houses of traditional finance, are now, cautiously and slowly, finding their way into digital assets. In 2021 he joined BitMEX as CFO, moved into the CEO role the following year during one of the industry’s most turbulent periods, and has been running it ever since. The background matters, because it shapes everything about how he talks about what BitMEX is and what it is becoming.

Traders, Not Investors

The first thing Lutz wants to clear up is the idea that BitMEX is a casino for retail gamblers. The platform’s reputation, built on high leverage, aggressive liquidations, and a user base that thrived in crypto’s wildest years, lingers. He pushes back on it, not by denying it, but by drawing a sharper distinction.

“There is a difference between a trader and an investor,” he says. “An investor is like my kids, my mom, saving every month, accumulating some wealth. A trader is someone who has a view on where markets are going to move, takes risk knowingly, and is accountable for it. That’s who trades on BitMEX.”

And when asked directly whether institutional clients are part of BitMEX’s reality today, not just its ambition, he is unequivocal. Between 70% and 80% of the exchange’s volume already comes from what he classifies as institutional: proprietary trading firms, market makers, high-frequency traders, and a growing tier of asset managers who entered crypto in the last cycle. The retail slice, he notes, is itself largely semi-professional: people who trade regularly, actively, with discipline.

70–80% of BitMEX volume is institutional. The remaining 20–30% is retail, but active, semi-professional traders, not casual investors.

“BitMEX stands for Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange,” he says. “It’s more like a Eurex or a Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It’s for the ones who trade actively.”

Better Than the CME — If You Can Handle It

The conversation that followed was the most surprising of the interview. When pressed on why a risk officer at a pension fund or a bank would ever choose BitMEX over a regulated venue, Lutz didn’t reach for the obvious answers: speed, liquidity, around-the-clock access. He went straight to the mechanics of counterparty risk, and turned the question around.

The regulation and the license — it’s not the cause, it’s the effect. Legal and compliance departments love the rubber stamp. But if you look at counterparty credit risk, we are way better. — Stephan Lutz, CEO, BitMEX

His argument works like this. Traditional exchanges like the CME and Eurex manage risk through clearing funds, pools of capital that members are required to contribute to, running into the billions. If a trader accumulates losses overnight, they receive a margin call the next morning. There is a time lag. There is recourse, meaning the exchange can come after a trader for money they owe. This is why membership of these exchanges requires significant minimum capital. The system works, but it is slow, expensive, and built for an era of fixed market hours.

BitMEX operates differently. Its so-called socialized loss mechanism means that risk is managed in real time. Traders see their position health on screen continuously with no delay: distance from liquidation, remaining collateral. If a position runs out of collateral, it is automatically closed. There are no margin calls, no morning-after settlements, no recourse. An insurance fund, accumulated from every trade, acts as the backstop. “Your counterparty credit risk situation,” Lutz says, “is way better than on the bigger exchanges.”

The catch, which he acknowledges openly, is that this model requires participants to monitor their positions around the clock. “If you operate a 24/7 market, that’s for some a little bit more challenging.” For a pension fund used to closing its books at 5pm, that is not a small thing. But his point stands: the architecture is not less safe than traditional clearing. It is differently safe, and in some respects more so.

Bringing Wall Street to Crypto, and Crypto to Wall Street

In January 2026, BitMEX launched what it calls Equity Perps: perpetual swap contracts on major U.S. stocks, including Apple, Tesla, Nvidia and the S&P 500, using Bitcoin or Tether as collateral, trading around the clock, including when American stock markets are closed. For an exchange that built its name on Bitcoin derivatives, it looked like a pivot. Lutz frames it as anything but.

“What we see in the industry right now is blurring lines,” he says. Banks are giving crypto exposure to their clients through the accounts they already have. The ETF boom is part of the same trend: people who want Bitcoin exposure without ever touching a crypto exchange. BitMEX, he argues, is the mirror image of that movement. “The crypto native guys, the digital native guys, they would love to have those equities, bonds, commodities, but they were not able to access this. We bring the access to them. That’s basically it.”

The product, he is careful to note, is not a tokenized stock. It is a perpetual swap on a stock, structurally identical to a futures contract on CME or Eurex on a particular company. The logic is familiar to any derivatives trader. The audience is new.

The U.S. Question

The question of the U.S. market itself came up directly. BitMEX has been locked out of America since its 2021 CFTC settlement. The backstory is more complicated than it appears. BitMEX had started building a full KYC programme in 2019 and completed it by 2020, covering proof of identity, proof of residence, liveness checks and source of funds. At the time, no such requirement existed anywhere in the world. The indictment, in Lutz’s telling, arrived after the problem had already been solved. The legal cloud has since cleared: the DOJ case was settled in 2024, and in March 2025 President Trump pardoned the co-founders. The regulatory environment in Washington has shifted sharply in crypto’s favour.

Lutz is measured. “We are closely looking at going back to the U.S., which would be not now,” he says. “Probably 2027. You still need to play the game. You need to apply for the relevant licenses. You need to make sure that you have an offering on the ground… So there is still work to be done, but we are looking closely at that and we hope to move next year.”

On the legislation driving the shift, specifically the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, he draws a distinction that most coverage has missed. CLARITY, he explains, is primarily stablecoin regulation, closer in spirit to Europe’s MiCA framework than to anything that would govern a derivatives platform like BitMEX. For re-entry into the U.S., the relevant licences, DCM or direct clearing member licences, already exist within the current regulatory framework. “The GENIUS Act was the real thing,” he says. The CLARITY Act, by contrast, he describes as “more a signal”; important for industry confidence, but not the mechanism BitMEX would actually apply under.

Note: BitMEX currently operates in over 120 countries. The United States remains a restricted jurisdiction. U.S. persons are prohibited from accessing the platform under its terms of service.

The Inflection Point

The final stretch of the conversation turned personal, and became the most revealing part of the interview. Lutz describes first encountering blockchain technology while still at Deutsche Börse, around 2010, before Bitcoin had become a cultural phenomenon. The exchange’s analysts looked at it seriously. Their conclusion was sobering: “It’s an answer to a question no one has posed.” At the time, classical exchange systems were executing millions of transactions per second. Blockchain was managing perhaps eighty. “Not fit for purpose,” he says. “Even if the immutability and the permissionlessness were great.”

The second moment came later, at PwC, when he was advising central banks in Southeast Asia on financial stability. Resolving a failed bank, he found, could take three to six months just to establish who owned what. “And then I thought — if you have everything on one ledger, it’s a second… You know who has what exposure.” Around the same time, working in countries where half the population had mobile phones but no bank accounts, he encountered the use case that finally made it click: payments, remittances, financial inclusion for people the traditional system had never served.

We will have both sides of the coin — one very crypto-native, where you bridge from TradFi to crypto, and then one TradFi, where you bridge from crypto to TradFi. It’s not an either/or. — Stephan Lutz, CEO, BitMEX

Two Rails, Not One Winner

On the question of whether crypto was ever going to replace fiat currency, a maximalist dream that briefly felt plausible in the early Bitcoin years, the mood was pragmatic. The two systems are not in a fight to the death. They are finding a way to coexist, and competition between them, however uneven, is probably good for the end user. “Sorry for the Bitcoin maximalists,” Lutz says, with a slight smile, “but that won’t happen. At least not in the foreseeable future… But you now have an alternative, and alternatives usually — you see this especially in Europe — are good. It makes life harder, but it makes life more stable. A good level of competition actually improves the experience for the end user.”

He points to something that tends to get lost in debates about crypto adoption: in Europe, more people now own digital assets than hold securities accounts. That proliferation happened quietly, in parallel with the rise of neobanks and retail investment apps. The two waves pushed each other forward. There was broad agreement that younger generations arriving at crypto and traditional finance simultaneously, on the same apps, without ever drawing a hard line between the two worlds, had quietly moved the needle on financial literacy in a way that often goes unacknowledged.

The most interesting thing about Stephan Lutz is not the exchange he leads. It is the vantage point he leads it from. Lutz spent twenty years inside the institutions that crypto was supposed to displace. He understands their risk frameworks, their compliance cultures, and their structural conservatism better than many running a crypto exchange today. His conclusion, after all of that, is not that those institutions were wrong, or that crypto has won, or that the old world is ending. The two systems are converging, slowly, messily, unevenly. And the exchanges that will matter are the ones that can operate credibly on both sides of that line. BitMEX, under Lutz, is making a deliberate bet that it can be one of them.

The post Exclusive: Stephan Lutz on BitMEX, Institutions and the Road Back to America appeared first on CrispyBull.

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Szymon Paluch is working on systems that combine artificial intelligence with robotics to support security in offices and industrial settings. Instead of relying solely on static infrastructure like cameras, these systems can respond dynamically. For example they can deploy robots to investigate issues in real time.

At the same time, the limitations of AI remain clear. Fully autonomous systems are not yet reliable enough to operate independently, meaning they still require deterministic frameworks and human oversight.

The topic was discussed during Next Block Expo in Warsaw, where AI applications were highlighted alongside developments in crypto and blockchain.

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Jacob Kasperek, Business Development leader at Weex, outlined how the AI Wars Hackathon brings together traders and developers to test algorithmic strategies in a live environment. The initiative has already attracted global participation and is set to expand further. The next edition will offer a prize pool of nearly $4 million.

The concept focuses on accessibility, allowing participants to experiment with AI-driven trading approaches. They can connect with partners, and gain exposure within a growing ecosystem.

The post $4M AI Trading Hackathon — Weex AI Wars with Jacob Kasperek appeared first on CrispyBull.

In crypto, building is only part of the challenge. At Next Block Expo, Player One Taco from 0xDegens highlighted the importance of storytelling and visibility.

The post Why Storytelling Matters in Crypto | Player1Taco appeared first on CrispyBull.

Lukka focuses on connecting traditional finance with crypto. At Next Block Expo, Dr. Suzanne Morsfield outlined how data and software infrastructure supports this integration.

The post Bringing TradFi and Crypto Together | Dr. Suzanne Morsfield, Lukka appeared first on CrispyBull.

Krzysztof Piech is a distinguished Polish economist, academic, and leading blockchain specialist with 11 years of experience in the cryptocurrency market. Currently serving as a Professor at Lazarski University and the Director of its Blockchain Technology Center, he recently appeared as a speaker at the Next Block Expo in Warsaw, recognized as one of the largest blockchain events in Europe.

His extensive professional background includes nearly 20 years as a lecturer at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and prestigious fellowships at University College London (UCL) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Beyond academia, Mr. Piech has played a pivotal role in shaping national policy, serving as a principal advisor to the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs on blockchain policy and as a business leader for the government’s digital transformation initiatives.

A prolific researcher and thought leader, he has authored over 100 scientific articles and co-edited more than 30 research books focused on innovation, economic policy, and financial crises. His current work explores the intersection of geopolitics, artificial intelligence, and institutional engineering, while he continues to support the global tech ecosystem as a mentor and advisor for numerous startups and international projects.

The post Krzysztof Piech: A Decade of Insights into Crypto and Blockchain Education appeared first on CrispyBull.

MEXC COO Vugar Usi shares his perspective from the Next Block Expo in Warsaw 2026 on the rapidly evolving landscape of digital finance. The core trend in the industry is now moving beyond traditional crypto to offer infinite opportunities across diverse markets. By integrating MT5, US stocks, prediction markets, and commodities like gold and petroleum, MEXC is enabling its 40 million users to trade any market condition with zero fees, turning standard wins into “win-wins”.

Trade everything with zero fees on MEXC

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