Notes from “Ded” in Singapore: Takeaways from TOKEN2049

Published: October 9, 2026 – 14:30 UTC

Disclaimer: the assessments, views, or opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s personal position and may not совпадать with the views of Incrypted’s editorial team.

Before TOKEN2049, I went to a few side events and wrote the first part of my notes. The main idea was pretty simple: the crypto industry has basically finished laying the rails, and now the fight is about who will control each specific stretch. I won’t repeat myself — you can read it all in the piece:

After two days of the TOKEN2049 conference itself, I was curious to see whether my hypotheses and first impressions held up.

Spoiler: overall, yes. But with an important caveat: on some of those rails, trains are already running. And yes, I’m not going to whine here about there being fewer people, boring booths, or the food not being tasty. If that’s the only thing you notice at conferences, stop going to them. That’s just the market phase and direction — it all tracks. So there won’t be an “Heads and Tails” style recap of TOKEN2049 here, sorry.

Big Players Aren’t Asking Whether They Need Blockchain Anymore

My first impression from the conference was how much the mix of people discussing tokenization has changed. Back in the day, it looked something like this: a crypto guy gets on stage and spends two hours explaining to a banker why blockchain is the future.

Now, on a panel titled Tokenization: The Next Investment Revolution, you’ve got representatives from Fidelity Investments, Bitwise, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and ICE (the company that owns the NYSE) sitting side by side. And the second day of the conference kicked off with a conversation between the head of Franklin Templeton, Binance’s co-CEO, and the head of Canton about tokenized assets, global liquidity, and settling transactions directly on-chain.

So the question “Will TradFi come to blockchain?” already feels a bit outdated. They are already here. Now the much more interesting question is different: which part of the blockchain infrastructure will they take for themselves, and which part will remain with crypto-native companies?

And right in the middle of TOKEN2049, we got a great example. Securitize launched tokenized shares of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Tesla, Meta, and Amazon. And this is no longer just synthetic exposure: the tokens are backed by real shares 1:1 and preserve dividends and investor rights. The launch is on Solana.

In parallel, Standard Chartered announced in Singapore plans to offer institutional clients custody services not only for cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, but also for tokenized real-world assets (RWA).

And this perfectly complements what I wrote about in the first part. There, we broke down the current leaders across individual layers — Ondo, Robinhood, Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, and others. TOKEN2049 was a reminder: these positions are not locked in forever. Because now, on the other side of crypto teams, there are companies with massive distribution, licenses, a client base, and, to put it mildly, a very solid amount of money.

Looks like I’m going to have to buy a blazer

After two days of TOKEN2049, you get a pretty weird feeling. Everyone around you is so successful and professional. Wherever you look, someone has already figured out how to tokenize bonds, someone else stocks, someone funds, someone real estate. Every other person has a strategic partnership with some company for $1 million. Every third person had breakfast yesterday with representatives of a fund whose name sounds like it manages half the planet. Everyone is talking about settlement, capital efficiency, institutional liquidity, and regulatory frameworks. And all of them have lots of “details” and really great “fabrics.”

And there we are, standing around with our bags of shitcoins, waiting for the bull run, and still writing news about an industry where there’s less and less room for retail. I mean retail as a full-fledged participant in the piracy and fun crypto chaos, not just a user of ready-made products that only the big grown-up guys will make money on.

You start to feel like maybe the crypto industry really is maturing, and it’s time to slowly pick out a blazer so you don’t completely fall behind the trends.

But jokes aside, there’s an important point here. In the first part, I wrote that the rails are basically built, but the winners haven’t been decided yet.

After TOKEN2049, I’m even more convinced of that, because the more big players come in, the tougher the fight will be for every layer. And that’s exactly why names like Ondo, Morpho, LayerZero, Centrifuge, or whatever the next project is, are potentially interesting not only because they’re building good tech. The real question is whether they can become the standard before this part of the market gets captured by someone with much bigger distribution. That’s where the game still is.

AI agents: a real debate finally showed up

Before the conference, AI agents looked like an almost mandatory slide in any deck. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz, in an interview with us, by the way, said it’s the dumbest TOKEN2049 narrative in the sense that everyone is trying to cram it into their presentation without fully understanding why.

The narrative itself is fine, the question is execution. In the first part, I wrote about apps where you tell an agent: buy me a ticket, find a hotel, order groceries, pick a product on Amazon — and then it does everything on its own. There are a lot of those projects here. Competition there will be absolutely brutal.

But at TOKEN2049, something much more interesting happened: the narrative finally started getting challenged from within the crypto industry itself. Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi came out with a talk titled Agents + Crypto: What’s Real & What’s Cope and literally opened with a confession: “I was wrong.”

His previous bet was that AI agents would almost inevitably become crypto users, because traditional financial infrastructure wouldn’t adapt fast enough. But Stripe, Visa, and others turned out to be faster than he expected.

And Haseeb’s new thesis is really elegant: “Your agent doesn’t need crypto. You need crypto.” In other words, having an autonomous AI doesn’t automatically mean it needs a blockchain.

And then, almost right next to that, Arthur Hayes comes out and tells a nearly opposite story. He ~~joked~~ unveiled FLOP — a project built around the idea that AI agents will, after all, need their own economy, but it should be pegged not to the dollar, but directly to the resource the agent consumes. In simplified form, the idea is this: the GPU provides compute, and the agent pays FLOP for inference. The testnet is planned for late October, and the mainnet — for Q1 2027. And that seems more grounded to me than when the whole industry chants in unison: “AI + crypto = the next trillion dollars.”

Now, at least, a real question has emerged: where does AI actually need crypto? If an agent is buying me a plane ticket, Visa will probably handle it just fine. If an agent needs permissionless access to capital, the ability to custody its own assets, trade with other autonomous agents, or pay for compute without a bank account, then blockchain starts to look a lot more logical.

In other words, the narrative is getting more mature. And that’s a good sign. Probably.

Privacy Is Definitely No Longer a Niche Story

One more thing we started tracking even before TOKEN2049 — privacy tech. After the ZEC move, it was clear: the market had a privacy bet. But one thing is a token price on a terminal. Another is how suddenly the topic broke onto the main stage.

At TOKEN2049, there was a dedicated panel, The Zcash Moment, with Balaji Srinivasan, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, moderated by Mert from Helius. In parallel, Zooko separately discussed The Privacy Imperative: Zcash and the Future of Digital Money with Grayscale’s head of research.

Panel discussion at TOKEN2049. Photo: Incrypted.

And this is where a number appeared that’s already hard to ignore. A Grayscale representative said at the conference that their Zcash-based ETF pulled in more than $1 billion in its first 30 trading days, putting it in the top 1% of ETFs launched over the past decade by that metric.

You can dismiss privacy as a niche topic for paranoids all you want. But $1 billion in a month is already a pretty clear market signal. And the next day, Quantum&Privacy Day took place separately — the one I wrote about in the first part. Check out the speaker and partner lineup, and take a look at the QTC chart.

Crypto is still a casino. Just a more professional one

I really liked another line from the conference. Polymarket founder Shane Coplan called the hunt for the next 100x token a game of “irrational abundance”: people understand perfectly well that the asset they’re buying may be practically useless, but they still buy it in the hope of making a lot of money and getting out before everyone else. Nothing new — just a very precise description of crypto.

And the funniest part is that Polymarket itself, broadly speaking, is a casino. Only instead of the next dog token, you’re degen-ing on probabilities. In other words, people haven’t stopped liking casinos, and they probably never will. It’s just that the casino is gradually getting better products.

Same story with Hyperliquid. Not long ago, derivatives platforms looked like a toy for completely unhinged crypto degens. Now Jeff Yan is on the main TOKEN2049 stage with a talk titled Rebuilding Finance from First Principles, while regulators are simultaneously trying to figure out what to do with a product that has real demand but doesn’t fit into the familiar financial architecture.

And this is probably another good sign of the current market. We are no longer debating whether it is technically possible to build this thing. It has been built. Now we are debating who will use it, who will make money on it, and who will eventually come in to regulate all of it.

Where are the regular users?

And this is where I come back to the main question from the first part. There is still more infrastructure than users for now. And at the booths, you feel it especially strongly. There are really a lot of people who, for some reason, decided that now anyone can build infrastructure. You can, but right across from you, the same infrastructure is being built by big guys with big money.

And if you have not built something truly unique, the odds that you will become the next global settlement layer just because you have a nice booth at Marina Bay Sands are pretty slim. At best, someone will buy you. And without distribution, capital, reputation, and connections, it is getting harder and harder to carve out any serious position.

So what should we do with all of this?

To make money on the next big move, you do not necessarily have to build a second Ondo yourself. You need to stay in the market long enough to spot where money, attention, and liquidity are showing up before most people do. Today, it is RWA. Tomorrow, privacy. Then AI agents. Then some new consumer product that nobody is talking about at all right now.

And the edge here doesn’t necessarily go to the smartest people (though dumb ones don’t have it easy either), but to those who are constantly in the market, learn fast, and can change their mind. The ones who don’t “marry” a single narrative, but can admit that yesterday’s bet no longer works, close it, and move on to the next one. The ones who stay close enough to the crazy people who are in the market 24/7 to hear a new idea before it shows up in a “10 trends for next year” roundup. And the ones who aren’t afraid to lose money from time to time.

Because if your strategy is to never be wrong, you’ll most likely just never take a real risk. In crypto, you’ll inevitably buy some garbage, try things that won’t work, get in too early, and get out too late.

But if after every mistake you get a little better at understanding where attention is moving and where liquidity is showing up, over time it all starts to come together. That’s probably why, after all these professionals in suits, I don’t feel like our game is over.

Quite the opposite. It’s just getting harder. And it looks like now, besides knowing how to buy memecoins, we’ll also have to learn to say “institutional liquidity” with a straight face. That’s probably why “Formula 1” showed up for me at exactly the right time.

*Ivan “Grandpa” Pavlovsky in Singapore. Photo: Incrypted.*

After TOKEN2049, the city literally switched to a different wave in just a couple of hours. Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull merch everywhere. Signs to the grandstands and fan zones, screens, ads, concerts, crowds, the sound of the cars. In short, even an idiot can tell: it’s “Formula 1” in Singapore right now. This is what truly mass-market hype looks like.

My first thought: crypto is still a long way from that. But then I thought: crypto doesn’t actually need to become “Formula 1.” It doesn’t need people walking around in Robinhood T-shirts. It doesn’t need your mom to know how Morpho is different from Aave. It doesn’t need the average person to understand what cross-chain liquidity is.

A real win will look completely different. All those “Formula 1” fans will open their regular apps, buy a Coke Zero, send money, take out a loan, book a hotel, or ask an AI agent to buy them a ticket.

And they won’t know at all that somewhere under the hood a blockchain is running. So there’s no need to wait for the moment when the whole world becomes “crypto people.” We need to wait until cryptocurrencies become such a normal part of the infrastructure that people stop noticing them at all.

And our job is to figure out before that moment which of today’s rails will actually become part of this system, and which will remain pretty demo booths from TOKEN2049. For now, I’m off to root for Ferrari.

I’ve been a Ferrari fan since childhood.

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Source: Incrypted