SEOUL — The HSC Conference returned to Seoul on October 1, 2026, convening senior representatives from financial institutions, crypto investment funds, and technology companies to examine the future of digital finance. The setting is fitting: South Korea has long ranked among the world's most active retail crypto markets. Among the event's most anticipated sessions was "Financial Infrastructure in the Digital Economy," a deep dive into the rails, platforms, and institutions reshaping how value moves in a digital-first financial system.

The panel was moderated by Mickey Hardy, Founder and Chairman of Arcadia. Speakers included Fernando Lillo, Marketing Director at Z Venture; Mykolas Majauskas, Global Head of Policy at Bybit; Takatoshi Shibayama, Head of APAC at Ledger Enterprise; Leonard Hoh, President of Bitstamp by Robinhood, the exchange Robinhood acquired in 2025; and Moz, Japan Partnerships & BD Manager at MetaMask, the self-custody wallet.

The Agentic Economy Comes On Chain

The session opened with moderator Mickey Hardy posing a question that would scarcely have been conceivable two or three years ago: how will AI agents — autonomous software that can initiate and complete transactions without human sign-off at each step — transact on financial infrastructure? Agents, he noted, could soon be executing millions of transactions a day — arguably more than humans.

Mykolas Majauskas framed the shift in stark terms, drawing on Bybit's experience running roughly $20 billion in daily trading volume, with AI already informing a large share of financial decisions. "We're getting into the stage where we've been focusing on knowing your customer to understanding that the customer is not necessarily a human but a software," he said, predicting a future of "know your AI" alongside traditional KYC — the know-your-customer identity checks that banks and exchanges must run under anti-money-laundering rules. Agents, he added, "don't care about the banking app colors design. What they care is: is it readable, is it programmable, can you access it 24/7."

Takatoshi Shibayama outlined a roadmap in which devices encode rules and policies for agents, ensuring that humans remain in the loop for significant transactions. Agents, for instance, might operate freely up to a $1,000 threshold before requiring human approval. Leonard Hoh pointed to Robinhood's launch of agentic trading, while Moz of MetaMask described an open-source agentic wallet, arguing that "the beauty of open source" means the ecosystem must build the agentic future together.

Regulation: Fragmented but Competitive

With the technological horizon surveyed, the conversation turned to policy — an area the panel agreed remains the industry's defining tension. Majauskas argued that "crypto touches everything that government wants to control," making increased government oversight inevitable, but stressed that competition between jurisdictions — from the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework to the US GENIUS Act's federal stablecoin regime and the CLARITY Act's effort to set market-structure oversight — creates opportunities. Fernando Lillo warned that intensive regulation can "kill innovation," calling for standard frameworks that reduce friction across markets, while Moz observed that regulation is only beginning to converge globally.

What Comes On Chain, and What Stays Off

The discussion then shifted from rules to roadmaps. Asked what will move on chain over the next three to five years, the panel diverged productively. Lillo pointed to stablecoins — tokens pegged to fiat currencies — and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, the on-chain representation of assets such as bonds and funds, as the next liquidity wave. Hoh pushed back as a self-described contrarian, warning that tokenizing everything ignores the question of demand: "Blockchain is not the answer to every problem. If it were easier to use pigeons, we would use pigeons again." Shibayama added that tokenization only matters when paired with automation — such as connecting assets to government registries — rather than simply replicating traditional securitization.

The panel agreed that personal data, complex legal structures, and heavy computation will remain off chain.

The Path to the Mainstream

On when the masses arrive, the panel agreed that infrastructure should eventually become invisible. "The success of the blockchain industry is when it actually becomes invisible," one panelist remarked, likening the goal to how users no longer think about internet protocols. Lillo stressed the need to balance simplicity for newcomers with transparency for professionals, while Moz identified UX as a critical remaining barrier — the reason MetaMask is building a one-stop wallet spanning cards, prediction markets, and agentic tools.

Hot Takes to Close

The session concluded with contrarian predictions. Hoh cautioned against expecting a rapid transition from fiat to crypto rails, predicting a five to ten year period in which both coexist. Majauskas expressed skepticism that sovereign wealth funds — state-owned investment vehicles that manage national reserves — will allocate to Bitcoin at scale.

After forty minutes of debate, one sentiment united the stage: the rails are being built, but pragmatism, trust, and human oversight will determine which of them survive.

Source: Metaverse Post