​Welcome to a celebration of Decentralised Finance, tokenization and digital asset innovation!

Blockchain Scotland is proud to announce Scotland's first Decentralised Finance Summit. Learn more about Blockchain Scotland here: https://www.blockchainscotland.xyz/
We are an industry association and a community of 1500 blockchain innovators around the UK and beyond.

Decentralised Finance (DeFi) began as an experiment in reimagining financial services without intermediaries. Today, it's evolving into something far more significant—the foundation for how AI agents transact, how institutions bridge traditional and digital assets, and how society itself organises value exchange. Our summit explores this transformation through multiple lenses: from Dr Sebastian Bürgel's permissionless banking innovations at Gnosis to Alejandro Acuña Rodríguez's vision of AI agents as autonomous economic actors, from institutional bridges with Ralf Taner to UK policy perspectives with Dr Lisa Cameron. You'll discover how stablecoins enable new payment paradigms, why privacy-preserving technologies matter for financial sovereignty, and how Scotland positions itself in this digital evolution. With insights spanning DeFi insurance protocols to agentic finance infrastructure, from regulatory frameworks to the intersection of money, AI and decentralisation, this summit examines not just where finance is heading, but how these technologies reshape commerce, governance, and human agency itself. Join us to explore practical pathways forward—where blockchain's transparency meets real-world complexity, and where Scotland's financial innovation legacy continues into the digital age.

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The DeFi market is worth billions and expected to grow significantly.

Topics of interest:
* DeFi innovation and innovative on-chain protocols
* DeFi regulation and policy
* Regulated TradFi applications of blockchain, also for banks, lenders and asset mangers
* Borrowing and lending protocols
* Tokenization of property and commodities
* Stablecoins
* The Foundations of DeFi
* The technology and business of decentralised applications
* Decentralised governance of DeFi products
* Privacy-enhancing blockchains and technologies
* Bitcoin DeFi infrastructure
* Connecting DeFi innovators with DeFi investors
* Agentic Finance & Agent platforms
* Decentralization & tokenization of insurance
* Bitcoin DeFi

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Travel Instructions

• ​By train: Arrive to Edinburgh Waverley train station and take 10 min Uber (or 30 min walk)

• ​By plane: Arrive to Edinburgh Airport and take 25 min Uber

​(journey time might increase during rush hours)

​Preliminary Schedule

​8.30 am - 9.30 am
Registration and coffee

9.30 am - 11.00 am
Session 1: Technology, Policy & Regulation

​9.30 - 9.40 am
Opening Remarks by the host, Maciej Zurawski from Blockchain Scotland

9.40 - 10.00 am
"Educating Policy Makers on Emerging Technology" by Dr Lisa Cameron President of The Financial Club & Former MP

10.00 - 10.15 am
"Ethereum: Enterprise Adoption and Financial Services" by Matthew Dawson, Enterprise Acceleration @ Ethereum Foundation 
Investigating best practices for enterprise and fintech adoption of blockchains for financial services. 

10.15 am - 10.30 am "The Autonomous Revolution: Transforming Asset Management with Agentic AI." by Sonia Schulenburg, Level E Research
Sonia will discuss the unique innovations of Level E, and how it is regulated.

10.30 am - 11.00am
Q&A with Lisa, Matthew and Sonia

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11.00 am - 11.30 am
Coffee break

11.30 am - 1.00 pm
Session 2: DeFi, Decentralisation & Decentralised Applications

​11.30 - 11.45 am
"Gnosis Pay: Towards permissionless banking" by
Sebastian Burgel, Gnosis
Sebastian will present Gnosis Pay - the first self-custodial Visa debit card, enabling everyday payments directly from a Safe, the leading on-chain account securing over $60B in assets. Built on top of Safe’s battle-tested multisig infrastructure and integrated with Monerium’s EURe, a fully regulated euro-denominated stablecoin issued under e-money laws, Gnosis Pay bridges traditional finance with self-custody. This marks a foundational step toward real-world utility for DeFi: regulated, interoperable, and while maintaining full control over your assets at all times.

​11.45 am - 12.00 pm
"Three Forces Reshaping Value: Money, AI and Decentralization", by Maciej Zurawski, Blockchain Scotland & Redeem Technologies
Starting with Adam Smith and David Hume, we identify ideas that Decentralized Finance embodies, 200+ years later. We compare the philosophical systems of traditional finance and DeFI, while contemplating their connection. We look at different types of financial AI, the economics of superintelligence and compare regulated financial agents with fully decentralized ones.

12.00 pm - 12.15 pm.
“The Next Frontier of DeFi” by Ian Wallis, Business Development, Consensys and Linea
This talk will cover how the next generation of DeFi is evolving to support newer use cases such as card payments, treasury management and institutions on scalable Ethereum Layer 2s.

12.15 pm - 12.30 pm
"We Sell Certainty" by Henry Murray-Smith, Market Town Software
Henry Murray-Smith will deliver what he calls a "conference fever dream" - a narrative journey through international payments, equities, bonds, non-profits, mortgages and regulators that reveals the current financial system as a carefully engineered mechanism to separate consumers from their money. Drawing from his insider experience and conversations with over thirty TradFi and DeFi professionals (some lasting over four hours), Henry explores how Bitcoin and DeFi could provide a rational alternative to this broken system. His presentation poses a crucial question: what will it take for DeFi, Bitcoin and Scotland to fix global finance? He concludes that the answer may lie in finding the right business model, proposing a pathway for conference innovators to bring a transformative platform to market within a few years - before the wider world realises the opportunity they've missed.

12.30 - 1.00 pm
Q&A with Sebastian, Maciej, Ian and Henry

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1.00 pm - 2.00 pm lunch

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2.00 pm - 4.00 pm
Session 3: Beyond Pure DeFi: Institutional Integration and Real-World Impact

​2.00 - 3.00pm
Panel: "TradFi meets DeFi"
Panel chair: Dia Banerji
Panel participants:

• ​Ralf Taner, Nexus Mutual

• ​Timothy Stevenson, BCP Technologies

• ​Matthew Dawson, Ethereum Foundation

• ​Kara Kennedy, JP Morgan

• ​Tim Sabanov, Zumo

​3.00 - 3.15 pm
"Passive Yield in DeFi, CeFi, and Beyond" by Dr Jason Liu, VP of XAM
Jason from XAM Group will present an overview of passive yield strategies in the crypto space, with a focus on DeFi protocols and how advanced techniques such as looping and flash loans can enhance passive returns. He will also explore centralized opportunities with simple but effective pricinples. Finally, He will share how a quant fund packages these strategies into scalable investment products.

3.15 - 3.20 pm
Q&A with Jason

3.20 - 3.35 pm
"Cryptoeconomic Lessons for Real-World Asset Projects" by Ben Whittle, founder of Token Architecture and co-founder of Just Cryptoeconomics
Ben Whittle, founder of Token Architecture and co-founder of Just Cryptoeconomics, distils his design experience into the core principles every real-world-asset project must master. Starting with a plain-English grounding in cryptoeconomics and the anatomy of an RWA stack, he demonstrates where incentive design truly matters, which native token functions add value, and how cash flow, equity, and token value distribution can be balanced in a way that supports project growth and attracts investors.

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3.35 - 3.55 pm
"Decentralised Public Goods - Getting from DeFi to Collective Intelligence", Dr Tom Wilkinson, Chief Data Officer, Scottish GovernmentA provocation to take blockchain, agentic AI, and Digital Trust beyond DeFi, evolving from technical to socio-technical design. Combining research in Complexity Economics and Collective Intelligence with a decade of experience pioneering Blockchain and AI across UK and Scottish governments, this call to action is based on the realities of public institutions as well as cutting edge theory.

3.55pm - 4.00pm
Q&A with Tom

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4.00 pm - 4.30 pm
Coffee break

4.30 pm - 6.00 pm
Session 4: AI, Disruption & Agentic Finance

​4.30 - 4.45 pm
"The Fintech and Agentic Finance Stablecoin Revolution"by Alejandro, Crossmint (remote)
Alejandro's talk will explore how blockchain and stablecoins are driving the agentic finance revolution through their inherent composability, programmability, and cryptographic truth. He'll demonstrate practical applications already in use today, including agentic commerce, microtransactions, API-based billing, treasury optimisation, DeFi portfolio rebalancing, and tokenised domain marketplaces. The presentation will conclude with real-world examples showing how fintech companies, neobanks, and remittance services are currently implementing stablecoins in their operations, providing concrete evidence of this technology's practical adoption beyond theoretical concepts.

​4.45 - 5.00 pm
"The Accidental Bridge – How AI Will Accelerate DeFi Adoption" by Dia Banerji
As financial services rapidly adopt AI, a new infrastructure is emerging—one that unintentionally bridges the gap between TradFi and DeFi. This talk explores how AI is unlocking institutional adoption of DeFi through tokenization, digital identity, and intelligent payments. It reframes DeFi not as a threat, but as a layer of opportunity in finance’s evolution. Expect real-world examples, bold insights, and a call to lead the transformation.

​5.00 - 5.10 pm
"The Next Frontier of Finance: Building Trustworthy AI with Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning" by Laurence Kirk, Extropy.io
The convergence of AI and DeFi is creating 'Agentic Finance'—autonomous systems managing financial strategies with remarkable efficiency. Yet this future faces a critical trust issue: how can we verify AI decisions when they're made in an opaque 'black box'? This talk explores Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML), a groundbreaking technology providing cryptographic verifiability for AI. By transforming AI from a centralised, untrusted oracle into a trustless on-chain primitive, zkML enables truly trustworthy autonomous finance. We'll examine real-world applications in on-chain credit scoring, complex derivatives, and verifiable AMMs, demonstrating how zkML is essential infrastructure for tomorrow's intelligent financial systems.

5.10 - 5.55 pm
Panel "Autonomous Finance: Where AI Agents Meet DeFi"
Panel chair: Maciej Zurawski
Participants:
* Sonia Schulenburg, Level E Research
* Andra Nicolau, Co-founder LYS Labs
* Laurence Kirk, Extropy.io
* Dia Banerji

Background about companies:

LYS Labs
LYS Labs is building the intelligence layer for the autonomous agent economy, starting with ultra-fast, structured blockchain data. It offers <14ms Solana data APIs, agent orchestration tools, and execution infrastructure for quant traders, bots, and AI systems. LYS turns raw on-chain data into actionable context, enabling agents to reason, decide, and act in real-time.

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5.55pm - 6.00pm Formal session closing remarks by the host, Maciej of Blockchain Scotland

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6pm - 8pm Drinks & canape reception

​This includes gluten-free and vegan canapes

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Speaker & Panel Contributors

​* Dr Lisa Cameron, President, The Financial Club
* Matthew Dawson, Enterprise Acceleration @ Ethereum Foundation
* Dr Sebastian Bürgel, VP Technology @ Gnosis, Founder of HOPR
* Ralf Taner, Head of Institutional, Nexus Mutual
* Ian Wallis, Consensys/Linea
* Dr Maciej Zurawski, Executive Director, Blockchain Scotland & CEO Redeem Technologies
* Alejandro Acuña Rodríguez, Head of Stablecoins, Crossmint
* Kara Kennedy, Head of Digital Asset Product, JPMorgan Securities Services
* Dia Banerji, Innovation Leader, Commercial Strategist, Blockchain Advocate
* Dr Jason Liu, VP of XAM
* Dr Tom Wilkinson, Chief Data Officer, The Scottish Government
* Ben Whittle, Founder & Cryptoeconomics Designer, Token Architecture
* Henry Murray-Smith, Founder, Market Town Software
* Dr Sonia Schulenburg, Founder & CEO, Level E Research
* Timothy Stevenson, Chairman of BCP Technologies
* Laurence Kirk, CEO, Extropy.io
* Tim Sabanov, CTO of Zumo
* Andra Nicolau, Co-founder LYS Labs
* Michael Brown, Blockchain Scotland

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Speaker & Contributor Bios

​Matthew Dawson, Enterprise Acceleration @ Ethereum Foundation 
Matthew is part of the Ethereum Foundation's Ecosystem Development team, focusing on Enterprise Acceleration. His background is in financial services consulting and blockchain advisory and investments.

​Dr Sebastian Bürgel, VP Technology @ Gnosis, Founder of HOPR
Sebastian Bürgel builds technical systems that empower the individual. He is VP Technology at Gnosis and founder of the anonymous data transport protocol HOPR, on top of which Gnosis VPN is being built. He has been teaching, developing, architecting, and integrating Ethereum Dapps since shortly after the Ethereum genesis block, with a focus on privacy, decentralization, and interoperability. He previously co-founded two other technology ventures: Validity Labs (blockchain education & services) and SONECT (fintech). Sebastian holds a Ph.D. in Microtechnology from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich).

Dia Banerji, Innovation Leader, Commercial Strategist, Blockchain Advocate
Dia Banerji is a visionary leader with over 20 years of experience across the UK, Middle East, and Asia, specialising in Wealth & Asset Management, Pensions, and Retirement. She has led large-scale digital transformations and developed customer-first propositions with commercial impact.

​As Head of Direct-to-Consumer Proposition at Standard Life (Phoenix Group), she led digital proposition & strategy for over 9 million customers and £200 billion in assets, delivering innovative solutions at scale.

​Dia is the CEO and co-founder of early-stage start-up Cherpa.ai, a voice-first AI money coach designed for women navigating life’s complex financial moments.

​Dia also co-founded Imagine Ventures, helping translate academic research into commercial ventures. She, serves on Scotland’s Digital Trust Taskforce, shaping the national strategy for blockchain and digital identity, and is an Independent Member of the Court at Abertay University, contributing to innovation and the future of education.

​With an MBA in Finance and two decades of cross-functional leadership, Dia combines deep industry knowledge with a passion for inclusive innovation. She champions entrepreneurship as an ambassador for Women Enterprise Scotland and has previously supported global identity inclusion initiatives through Women in Identity.

​Dr Tom Wilkinson, Chief Data Officer, Scottish Government
Working for and with government organisations, at various levels and around the world, Tom has spent a decade developing and improving use of data to inform policy, strategy, and operational decisions. Tom has extensive hands-on experience working across Data Science, Data Analysis, Data Architecture, Software Development and Data Engineering, and has provided technical advice to blue chip companies and startups as well as intergovernmental organisations. Tom's abiding interest is in using data science and social science, to design institutions that are fairer and make better use of people's Collective Intelligence.

Ian Wallis, Business Development, Consensys and Linea
Ian leads Business Development for the Linea network, a cutting-edge zkEVM Layer 2 solution built by Consensys, running on Ethereum. Before joining Linea, he spearheaded Business Development efforts at Consensys and MetaMask, driving strategic growth and adoption of blockchain services, and sitting on the Executive Committee of the MetaMask Grants DAO. Ian’s experience also includes leadership roles in Business Development at Oracle, where he contributed to launching new cloud services across AI and Mobile. With a proven track record in technology, Ian has worked for several Platform as a Service startups that successfully exited to major companies such as RedHat, Pega Systems, and OpenText, leading teams across Europe and Asia as well as driving the rollout of mobile internet and messaging services globally.

​Dr Lisa Cameron President of The Financial Club & Former MP
Dr Lisa Cameron was an MP in the UK Parliament from 2015-2024. During this time, she chaired the House of Commons first Cryptocurrency & Digital Assets All Party Parliamentary Group and developed a programme of education for MPs and Lords to learn about emerging technologies. Greengage in their 2024 publication Digital Parliamentarians named Dr Cameron as the MP who had raised cryptocurrency and digital assets more than any other parliamentarian. Since stepping down from Parliament, Dr Cameron has become Chair of the Digital Assets Global Forum and founded the UKUS Crypto Alliance, continuing her work in the sector on regulation and global policy making. In 2025, Dr Cameron was named Outstanding Industry Influencer of the Year at the Digital Commonwealth Awards.

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Andra Nicolau, Co-founder LYS Labs
Andra has an eight-year track record of driving growth and raising over $300M for groundbreaking DeFi projects such as 1inch. As a fearless operator and capital raiser, she secured funding from top Wall Street firms and led one of the largest fundraises in a male-dominated sector.

​She is now the co-founder of LYS Labs, an R&D lab building infrastructure at the intersection of Web3 and AI. The team is focused on solving high-complexity data challenges—from ultra-low-latency blockchain data structuring to powering autonomous trading agents and on-chain intelligence systems.

Ben Whittle, founder of Token Architecture and co-founder of Just Cryptoeconomics
Ben Whittle is a specialist in cryptoeconomics with seven years of experience in the blockchain sector. He is the founder of Token Architecture and co-founder of Just Cryptoeconomics. At Token Architecture, he collaborates with founders and technology leaders to transform ambitious ideas into robust token economies that align incentives and meet investor expectations. Through Just Cryptoeconomics, he publishes open research and analytical frameworks that help investors separate genuine value accrual from market noise.

Henry Murray-Smith, Market Town Software
Henry Murray-Smith is the founder of Market Town, the Bitcoin-native software company building the most accessible product in history. Bitcoin is a global network, but lacks a user-friendly gateway. The Market Town app will work on every mobile device on earth and is user-friendly to anyone who can send a text message. Henry's personal mission is to flip Bitcoin's narrative from store of value to medium of exchange, disrupting sleepy giants like Western Union and Coinbase, and making sure everyone on earth wakes up with the same financial opportunities.

​Event Details

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Your ticket includes: access to talks + networking reception + lunch + coffee + drinks & canapes

Our air-conditioned venue fits a vast audience, so invite your friends and colleagues to join!

You can also buy an exhibition booth at this event - contact us to find out more!

Marketing Partners
Fintech Scotland

​Ecosystem Partners
Fintech Armenia

We thank our sponsors:
* Ethereum Foundation
* Consensys
* Gnosis
* Nexus Mutual
* Redeem Technologies
* BCP Technologies
+ others