Agenda

8:00 am

Breakfast & registration

Arrive from 8:00 AM and head to the main event floor to collect your name badge and enjoy a full hot breakfast catered by The William Vale alongside fellow attendees. Please have your photo ID ready for check-in. Registration is brought to you by Moody’s Ratings, with freshly made coffee and matcha available from our espresso cart, brought to you by Dinari. Settle in, connect, and fuel up before mainstage programming begins promptly at 9:00 AM.

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9:00 am

Welcome to the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026

An overview of the key themes shaping the program, what to expect throughout the two days, and a few essential housekeeping notes before the mainstage gets underway.

Foster Wright

Real-World Asset Summit

Michael  Casey

Real-World Asset Summit

9:10 am

Fireside – The convergence moment: AI, tokenization and programmable money

The global financial landscape, seen from both sides of a profound industry convergence. A co-founder of Ethereum and the creator of the most influential lab in that blockchain's ecosystem is joined by the leader of an iconic American institution that produces some of the world's longest-trusted market data, and by a Wall Street veteran whose new gig growing capital for the tokenized future puts him astride both worlds. Their task: to tell us what the world of money & investing looks like 5 years from now.

Cathy Clay

S&P Dow Jones Indices

Joseph Chalom

Sharplink

Joseph Lubin

Founder & CEO of Consensys

Moderator

Bhaji Illuminati

Centrifuge

9:40 am

Panel – TradFi-ification vs DeFi-ification: Who's taking over whom? Or is this a merger of equals?

"TradFi," "DeFi" or just "Fi"? Leaders of protocols, tokenization platforms, and financial institutions take stock of innovation trends and assess which onchain elements are winning out versus those of traditional, offchain finance. They also look for compromise, hybrid solutions, and areas where such amalgamations still need to occur.

Carlos Domingo

Securitize

Dan  Doney

DTCC

Samara Cohen

BlackRock

Sonali  Theisen

Bank of America

Moderator

Johnny  Reinsch

Tokenized Asset Coalition

10:10 am

Panel – The bank of the future

The centralized record-keeping system underpinning fractional-reserve banking dates from the Medici family's 15th-century introduction of double-entry bookkeeping. Blockchain ledgers, tokenization and AI are poised to disrupt all that. It's the moment to ask: What survives, what disappears, and what new features and forms of onchain money will the bank of the future absorb?

Azra  Pravdic

Citizens

Mike McCoy

Fiserv

Nick van Eck

Agora

Simon Griffin

Sofi

Moderator

Christian Lopez

Cohen & Company Capital Markets

10:40 am

Panel – Pros and cons of public blockchains for finance

Privacy, unfettered innovation, security, decentralized governance, scalability — these are the issues that define the pros and cons of public blockchains. Where is true decentralization helpful for the financial system? Where is it unhelpful or even dangerous? A discussion based on research by the MIT Digital Currency Initiative.

Angelo Aratan

Kinexys by J.P. Morgan

Austin Campbell

Zero Knowledge Group

Carlos Arena

OP Labs/ Optimism

Jasmine Burgess

Blockstream Capital Partners

Moderator

Neha  Narula

MIT Media Lab

11:10 am

Panel – Finance is going onchain, but which chain?

We hear from advocates for some of the major Layer 1 blockchains, each making a case for the advantages their model offers for real-world assets. The panel also explores interoperability solutions so that investors and institutions avoid being locked into walled gardens and maintain choice.

Morgan  Krupetsky

Ava Labs

Raja Chakravorti

Stellar Development Foundation

Georgia Quinn

Forward Industries, Inc.

Moderator

Chris Donovan

Compound Foundation

11:35 am

Fireside – The great collateral unlock

The dozens of institutions now working on the Canton platform are a harbinger of radical changes coming to finance. One key area of that is the high-volume business of collateral management. Digital Asset's CEO joins Nasdaq's Head of Strategy to discuss how a blockchain back-end turns collateral into a dynamic asset, unlocking large-scale value from existing balance sheets and improving banks' risk and cash management.

Matthew  Savarese

Nasdaq

Yuval Rooz

Digital Asset | Canton

Moderator

Ronit Ghose

Cambridge Judge Business School

11:50 am

Full-Room Roundtable Discussions — What’s needed for a DeFi-TradFi merger of equals?

In this all-in participation session operated under the Chatham House Rule – redefined for an AI-recorded environment – audience members engage in facilitated discussions at their table. A set of questions will be given to the full room, with each group asked to discuss them and then to sequentially stack-rank their answers. The goal is to convert recordings of these conversations into a summary of where consensus lies around resolving some of the thornier issues in tokenization.

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Moderator

Michael  Casey

Real-World Asset Summit

12:35 pm

Lunch in Leuca

Enjoy a leisurely Italian lunch upstairs at Leuca, featuring a hot buffet inspired by the restaurant’s signature cuisine. Dine indoors or enjoy lunch outside in the Leuca Piazza, with time to connect and recharge before the afternoon program begins.

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1:35 pm

Panel – Reimagining asset management through the lens of tokenization

Fund management firms have been among the first to embrace tokenization. But there's still a long way to go to bring their end-user customers on board. How can these first-mover firms package their tokenized offerings to appeal to pension funds and other institutional asset owners as well as to retail investors?

Blue Macellari

T. Rowe Price

Cynthia Lo Bessette

Fidelity Investments

Nick Cherney

Janus Henderson Investors

Moderator

Cameron Drinkwater

S&P Dow Jones Indices

2:00 pm

Panel – Getting investors to take the plunge into RWAs

What’s needed to drive demand for tokenized fund products among investors? Asset managers have been tokenizing their offerings for some time, and the pace is even picking up. But there are barriers preventing rapid growth in core demand, both from institutional asset owners and retail investors. This panel identifies those barriers and looks at how to overcome them.

Thomas Chen

BNB Chain

Timm Reinsdorf

Particula Ratings

Jon Casterline

VanEck

Sam  ten Cate

State Street Investment Management

Moderator

Colin  Cunningham

Chainlink Labs

2:25 pm

Panel – Retrofitting for stablecoins: Readying the institutional plumbing for programmable money

Stablecoins, easily the biggest success story of tokenization, are the on-ramp to real-world assets and onchain finance. But to be widely adopted, stablecoins require upgrades to systems and processes, linkages to the banking system, the right regulatory framework, and reliable market liquidity. Solutions are being built.

Charles Yoo-Naut

Rain

John Conneely

Sky Frontier Foundation

Ryan Bozarth

Dakota

Walter Hessert

Paxos

Moderator

Tanya  Denisova

Agora

2:55 pm

Panel – Getting the soup just right: Creating the conditions for liquidity and secondary market activity

Everyone's issuing tokenized RWAs but who's trading them? This panel includes builders who say their products enable the liquidity needed to grow a secondary market for RWAs. They're building new models for market-making, cross-chain interoperability and on- and off-chain custody and clearing.

Alex Taaffe

GSR

Matt Zhang

Hivemind Capital

Simon Barnby

Archax

Moderator

Krisztian  Sandor

CoinDesk

3:20 pm

Panel – If you can't trust the data driving your decisions, what can you trust?

Reliable, trustworthy information has always been the backbone of efficient capital markets. The age of tokenization does nothing to change that, even if what people need to know and how they get it is changing. How do we know the stablecoin we're receiving is safe? How do we know a smart contract-driven index is accurate? How does a decentralized system process information from outside the chain? New and old practitioners discuss how to build trust in the digital finance ecosystem.

Andrew McCormick

Chainlink

Fabian Astic

Moody's Ratings

Kristen  Mierzwa Barrie

FTSE Russell

Moderator

Michelle Noyes

AIMA

3:45 pm

Fireside – How a legacy asset manager is building for an onchain future

From New York Life Investment Management with over $837 billion* in AUM, Thomas Sy and Elizabeth Yenko join Centrifuge CEO Bhaji Illuminati to share how they started NYLIM's digital assets initiative from the inside, moved beyond pilots, and why the future of asset management infrastructure will be built by firms willing to move before they have to.

*Assets under management (AUM) as of June 30, 2026.

Elizabeth Yenko

New York Life Investment Management

Thomas Sy

New York Life Investment Management

Moderator

Bhaji Illuminati

Centrifuge

4:05 pm

Fireside – DeFi OG #1

The first of two special segments featuring a leading founder from the early days of DeFi. We ask Stani Kulechov, the genius behind the onchain lending network Aave: What does the world of money, finance, wealth and value look like in the future?

Stani Kulechov

Aave Labs

Moderator

Matthew Roszak

Bloq

4:20 pm

Panel – Building secure infrastructure for agentic AI

It seems like agentic AI and real-world assets are made for each other — until the security risks become apparent. How do institutions and investors keep their data, their IP and their employees safe and how do they maintain control over their AI deployments?

Alex Scharrer

NEAR

J. Christopher Giancarlo

Patomak Global Partners

Sean Neville

Catena

Moderator

Bettina Warburg

Advanced AI Society

4:45 pm

Panel – Every stock, tokenized

The New York Stock Exchange is launching a tokenized stock platform with 24/7 trading. What does this significant change by the most famous exchange in the world mean for Wall Street and global capital markets? We hear from the trailblazing CEO who's making it happen.

Lynn  Martin

NYSE Group

Moderator

Jill Shah

Financial Times

5:00 pm

Panel – The killer use case from the AI-tokenization convergence: Managing complex risk

As transactions go onchain in a 24/7, instant-settlement trading environment, and as AI agents take all that to another level, the risk environment is changing dramatically for investors and the financial institutions serving them. Whether for compliance, transaction monitoring or for weighing the risk/return profile of a bot-managed investment portfolio, the landscape is becoming considerably more complex. Thankfully, this technological convergence also contains within it the solution.

Andrew Hong

Herd Labs

Caitlin  Barnett

Chainalysis

Nikhil Raghuveera

Predicate

Moderator

Carl  Vogel

6th Man Ventures

5:25 pm

Day 1 closing remarks

Before heading up to Westlight, we’ll deliver Day 1 closing remarks alongside our friends at BNB Chain.

Michael  Casey

Real-World Asset Summit

Thomas Chen

BNB Chain

5:30 pm

7:30 pm

Networking reception at Westlight – co-hosted with BNB Chain

Close out Day 1 with cocktails, bites, and sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline at Westlight, the rooftop at The William Vale, co-hosted with BNB Chain. Connect with fellow attendees, continue the day’s conversations, and unwind before we reconvene for Day 2.

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Agenda

8:00 am

Breakfast & registration

9:00 am

Welcome to the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026

Foster Wright

Real-World Asset Summit

Michael Casey

Real-World Asset Summit

9:10 am

Fireside – The convergence moment: AI, tokenization and programmable money

Cathy Clay

S&P Dow Jones Indices

Joseph Chalom

Sharplink

Joseph Lubin

Founder & CEO of Consensys

Moderator

Bhaji Illuminati

Centrifuge

9:40 am

Panel – TradFi-ification vs DeFi-ification: Who's taking over whom? Or is this a merger of equals?

Carlos Domingo

Securitize

Dan Doney

DTCC

Samara Cohen

BlackRock

Sonali Theisen

Bank of America

Moderator

Johnny Reinsch

Tokenized Asset Coalition

10:10 am

Panel – The bank of the future

Azra Pravdic

Citizens

Mike McCoy

Fiserv

Nick van Eck

Agora

Simon Griffin

Sofi

Moderator

Christian Lopez

Cohen & Company Capital Markets

10:40 am

Panel – Pros and cons of public blockchains for finance

Angelo Aratan

Kinexys by J.P. Morgan

Austin Campbell

Zero Knowledge Group

Carlos Arena

OP Labs/ Optimism

Jasmine Burgess

Blockstream Capital Partners

Moderator

Neha Narula

MIT Media Lab

11:10 am

Panel – Finance is going onchain, but which chain?

Morgan Krupetsky

Ava Labs

Raja Chakravorti

Stellar Development Foundation

Georgia Quinn

Forward Industries, Inc.

Moderator

Chris Donovan

Compound Foundation

11:35 am

Fireside – The great collateral unlock

Matthew Savarese

Nasdaq

Yuval Rooz

Digital Asset | Canton

Moderator

Ronit Ghose

Cambridge Judge Business School

11:50 am

Michael  Casey

Dan  Doney

Sonali  Theisen

Johnny  Reinsch

Azra  Pravdic

Neha  Narula

Morgan  Krupetsky

Matthew  Savarese

Michael  Casey

Sam  ten Cate

Colin  Cunningham

Tanya  Denisova

Krisztian  Sandor