Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Yeouido Leaders Converge as EastPoint: Seoul 2026 Unveils First Lineup

Private event to be held Sept. 28 at The Westin Seoul Parnas

Key digital-asset and stablecoin issues on the agenda

High-level closed-door talks to be held

Franklin Templeton, with about $1.8 trillion in assets under management

a16z, the world's largest venture capital firm

Tether and Circle, the two dominant stablecoin issuers

Senior global digital-asset executives to gather

Political figures including Democratic Party lawmaker Min Byung-duk and Reform Party lawmaker Lee Jun-seok

Top executives from major financial firms including KB, Shinhan, Hana, Woori and Mirae Asset

Senior leaders from major fintech firms including KakaoPay and Toss to attend

Senior executives from major institutions shaping the global digital-asset market, including Franklin Templeton, Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, and stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, will gather privately in Seoul. They will attend EastPoint: Seoul 2026, the country's largest private digital-asset conference.

EastPoint will be held on Sept. 28 at The Westin Seoul Parnas in Seoul's Samseong-dong district. The event is co-hosted by global venture capital firm Hashed, Bloomingbit, South Korea's largest digital-asset media outlet, and the Korea Economic Daily. This year marks its second edition.

More than 200 institutions and 503 decision-makers attended last year's event. Organizers said this year's conference will again bring together a select group of policymakers, global institutions and Web3 leaders to focus on South Korea's emerging digital-asset market and the broader trend of global institutional adoption.

EastPoint on Sept. 1 released its first group of speakers and participating companies for the 2026 event. The lineup includes Chetan Karkhanis, senior vice president at Franklin Templeton, and Guy Wuollet, general partner at a16z Crypto.

Other speakers include Harry Jung, former deputy executive director of the White House Digital Assets Advisory Council; Caroline Pham, chief executive officer of MoonPay Institutional and former acting chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and Kirk Cullimore, a Utah state senator and Republican majority leader. Also on the participant list are Ryo Kato, senior executive vice president at SBI and chief executive officer of HashHub, and Wai Lum Kwok, senior executive director for authorization and fintech at Abu Dhabi Global Market, or ADGM.

Global stablecoin and digital-asset companies including Tether and Circle will also participate. Speakers include David Katz, vice president for strategy and policy for Asia-Pacific at Circle; Francesco Fabbri, head of tokenization expansion at Tether; Yuval Rooz, chief executive officer of Canton Network; Joseph Lubin, founder of Consensys and co-founder of Ethereum; Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer at Maelstrom; and Hong Kim, chief technology officer at Bitwise.

Senior executives from Coinbase, the largest US digital-asset exchange, Ripple, the issuer of XRP, and custody firm BitGo are also scheduled to attend.

From South Korea's political sphere, speakers will include Democratic Party lawmaker Min Byung-duk, Democratic Party floor deputy leader Ahn Do-geol and Reform Party lawmaker Lee Jun-seok. In the domestic securities and fintech industries, senior executives from Mirae Asset Securities, NH Investment & Securities, Meritz Securities, Eugene Investment & Securities and Toss will attend.

The event will also feature top executives from the card and asset-management sectors, including Visa, Samsung Card, Hyundai Card, BC Card, Mirae Asset Global Investments, KB Asset Management, Shinhan Asset Management and Hana Asset Management.

Sponsors for EastPoint: Seoul 2026 include Tether, Circle, MoonPay, Presto, Ondo Finance, Limitless, BitGo, Anchorage Digital, Plume Network, Optimism, Injective, Talos and the ADI Foundation. Korea-based companies including KakaoPay, Suho.io, D'CENT and Kaia are also listed as sponsors. Bitman is participating as a community partner. Official research partners include Hashed Open Research, Tiger Research and 4pillars.

This year's EastPoint will center on five main themes: the start of the institutional investment era, the evolution of stablecoins, the on-chain shift in capital markets, the age of AI agents and blockchain adoption in everyday life. The agenda has broadened from last year to include topics such as AI agents, real-world assets and stablecoins.

As in the inaugural event, the conference will run on a dual-track structure combining a main stage with private roundtables.

At the first EastPoint last year, more than 200 institutions and 503 decision-makers took part in more than 50 business meetings and more than 40 private roundtables. Lawmakers from the Democratic Party, the People Power Party and the Reform Party attended alongside policy leaders from South Korea and abroad, including figures from the White House and the CFTC, for discussions on digital-asset regulation and policy direction.

Hashed CEO Kim Seo-jun said stablecoins and asset tokenization have become part of the real market after several years of experimentation. "The question now is no longer whether the possibility exists, but which businesses and systems can work over the long term," he said.

He added that EastPoint brings to Seoul the people building markets and the people designing institutions to find that answer together.

Bloomingbit CEO Kim San-ha said EastPoint brings together top global figures from institutions, policy and capital markets for in-depth discussions on the digital-asset market's most pressing issues. "The release of the first speaker and participating-institution lineup, along with the main themes, should give a sense of the depth of the conversations that will take place this year," he said.

He added that future lineup announcements, along with still-undisclosed participants, will allow attendees to experience firsthand the value that only EastPoint can create.