The HSC Conference is returning to Seoul with a participant roster that spans the full breadth of the digital asset economy, drawing leaders from global financial institutions, crypto investment funds, and technology companies to examine the trends and opportunities shaping the next phase of digital asset adoption across Asia-Pacific and beyond.

Scheduled for October 1, 2026, at Novotel Ambassador Seoul Gangnam, the conference will assemble founders, executives, and investors working at the intersection of blockchain infrastructure, tokenization, and on-chain financial markets. Sessions will examine the forces driving the next of digital finance, ranging from investment strategy and market structure to the deepening convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence. The date itself frames the moment: by the time delegates gather, Galaxy Digital will have spent several months as a Nasdaq-listed company, Ethereum Institutional will have completed its first full quarter of operations, and the targeted Q3 2026 close window for Animoca Brands' Nasdaq merger will have passed — placing the gathering just after a run of execution milestones for its own headline participants rather than amid them.

Notable companies participating in the Seoul edition include S&P Global, Galaxy Digital, Ethereum Institutional, Maelstrom, Canary Capital, C² Ventures, Animoca Brands, Offchain Labs, ZKsync, Monad Foundation, Steakhouse Financial, Cactus Custody, Ledger Enterprise, Bybit, Tether, Base, BNB Chain, and Ether.fi, among many others. Below is a closer look at some of the conference's headline participants.

Animoca Brands

Few firms have contributed more to building the infrastructure of digital ownership than Animoca Brands. The Hong Kong-based blockchain developer and crypto investor posted $314 million in revenue for 2024, marking a 12% year-over-year increase, of which $165 million came from its digital asset advisory business. The company holds positions in more than 600 Web3 companies, including stakes in Consensys and Kraken.

In November 2025, Animoca filed for a Nasdaq listing through a reverse merger with Currenc Group, a transaction the company expects to create what co-founder and executive chairman Yat Siu described as the world's first publicly listed, diversified digital assets conglomerate, spanning DeFi, AI, NFTs, gaming, and DeSci. By May 2026, the deal carried a nominal valuation of $8.7 billion based on Currenc's market capitalisation, with the transaction targeting a close in Q3 2026. For observers tracking where Web3 investment, digital ownership, and mainstream adoption meet, Animoca Brands stands as one of the industry's most instructive case studies.

S&P Global

Among traditional financial institutions, S&P Global has taken some of the most deliberate steps into digital assets in 2026. Recent milestones include tokenizing the iBoxx U.S. Treasuries Index on the blockchain in March 2026 — the first instance of a major index provider making a financial benchmark available as a native digital asset — and launching the co-branded S&P Kaiko Digital Asset Indices suite for global, 24/7 digital asset markets in September 2026.

The company has also published Stablecoin Stability Assessments and issued its first credit rating for a DeFi protocol. Most recently, S&P Global agreed to acquire smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin, extending its assets strategy into onchain risk assessment. The acquisition places the security standards underpinning the world's leading stablecoins, tokenized funds, and DeFi protocols within the S&P umbrella. For those seeking to understand how institutional-grade standards are being applied to on-chain finance at scale, S&P Global currently offers the clearest window into that process.

Galaxy Digital

Galaxy Digital listed on the Nasdaq in May 2026, ending a years-long dual-listing arrangement on the Toronto Stock Exchange that had been required by U.S. regulatory caution toward its crypto-centric business. Founded by Mike Novogratz, the firm has grown from a crypto financial services company into a multi-engine platform spanning asset management, trading, and data center infrastructure.

Its flagship Helios data center in West Texas is being developed for AI and high-performance computing workloads, with CoreWeave occupying significant capacity at the facility — a positioning that places Galaxy at the meeting point of crypto and the AI infrastructure boom. The Nasdaq-listed firm is positioned to benefit from continued digital asset market recovery, an expanding ETF market, and data center revenues, a combination analysts have described as a multi-engine growth model. With one of the deepest research operations in the industry and a growing institutional footprint across Asia, Galaxy Digital brings both market authority and strategic breadth to the Seoul agenda.

Maelstrom

Maelstrom is the family office of Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, and invests across the crypto and Web3 ecosystem. Co-founded with Managing Partner Akshat Vaidya in 2023, the fund pursues a patient capital philosophy that prioritizes quality projects over rapid deployment — an approach that has shaped its portfolio strategy since inception.

In 2025, Maelstrom moved to raise $250 million for its debut private equity vehicle, Maelstrom Equity Fund I, which targets four to six acquisitions of medium-sized companies in the crypto space, concentrating on trading infrastructure, data analytics, and blockchain service providers. Entering 2026, Hayes positioned the fund at near-maximum risk exposure, wagering on a liquidity wave driven by U.S. deficit spending and favoring privacy coins and emerging DeFi tokens as his highest-conviction positions. Hayes will also deliver a solo address at HSC Conference Seoul, making Maelstrom one of the most closely watched perspectives in active crypto investing today.

Offchain Labs

Offchain Labs is the original developer of Arbitrum, the market-leading Ethereum Layer 2 network, and across 2025 and 2026 it has been pushing decisively beyond core infrastructure. Arbitrum One has processed over 2.1 billion lifetime transactions and reached $20 billion in total value secured in 2025, consistently ranking as the largest Ethereum Layer 2 by market share.

In August 2025, Offchain Labs acquired ZeroDev, a leading smart account infrastructure provider, a deal that marked its shift from a chain-level infrastructure company to a full-stack developer platform, with smart account abstraction now central to how institutions and consumer applications onboard users. Most recently, Robinhood selected Arbitrum as its blockchain of choice for bringing tokenized U.S. stocks to European investors — a landmark endorsement of Arbitrum's institutional capabilities. Co-founder Ed Felten, a former Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, brings both technical depth and policy credibility to the Seoul stage.

Ethereum Institutional

Ethereum Institutional launched on July 1, 2026 as an independent nonprofit dedicated to accelerating institutional adoption of Ethereum, its Layer 2 networks, and the broader ecosystem. Founded by David Walsh, Matthew Dawson, and Marius Smith — three former members of the Ethereum Foundation's enterprise team — the organization positions itself as a neutral, dedicated point of contact for banks, asset managers, custodians, and sovereign institutions evaluating Ethereum for tokenization, stablecoins, and on-chain finance.

Anchor funding comes from BitMine, SharpLink, and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin. According to Token Terminal, Ethereum holds nearly 58% of the tokenized RWA market, and the network accounts for approximately half of the $311 billion stablecoin market. Ethereum Institutional's mandate is to convert that market dominance into institutional relationships, and its presence at HSC Conference Seoul underscores how seriously the Ethereum ecosystem is now pursuing TradFi engagement.

Who's Coming to Seoul: A Conference Built Across Every Layer of Digital Finance

HSC Conference Seoul 2026 will gather a wide-ranging group of investors, builders, protocol developers, and institutional operators, each representing a distinct layer of the digital asset economy as it converges with global markets.

Capital allocation and investment perspectives anchor the opening of the day. Maelstrom and C² Ventures join the Investments Today panel alongside Canary Capital and Portal Ventures, offering a direct view into how professional capital is being deployed across digital assets and emerging blockchain opportunities in the current cycle. A solo keynote by Maelstrom's CIO will set the intellectual tone for the day's investment conversation.

Institutional finance and regulated infrastructure take centre stage through S&P Global, Galaxy Digital, and Ethereum Institutional, whose representatives lead DeFi and digital assets strategy, Asia institutional operations, and institutional ecosystem development respectively. Their joint appearance on the Institutional Adoption of Digital Assets panel, alongside IBM Digital Asset, Ether.fi, and Soter Insure, makes it one of the most substantive conversations on the agenda, mapping how traditional financial institutions are progressing from pilot programmes to operational deployment of blockchain-based financial infrastructure.

Blockchain infrastructure and protocol development are represented by a notably diverse set of participants. ZKsync, Monad Foundation, Base, Sonic Labs, and BNB Chain each bring distinct perspectives on scalability, developer tooling, and the conditions required for Web3 infrastructure to achieve mainstream throughput. Hashgraph contributes an enterprise blockchain angle to the Mainstream Web3 Adoption panel, grounding infrastructure discussion in real institutional deployment.

The tokenisation and RWA segment draws on some of the space's most operationally active players. RedStone, Atom Finance, Hypernative, Dfns, and Shinhan Bank approach on-chain asset infrastructure from complementary angles — from oracle-layer data integrity and tokenisation strategy to institutional security, and the vantage point of a major Korean bank already active in global blockchain business. Custody and key management infrastructure will be addressed by Cactus Custody and Ledger Enterprise, covering both institutional-grade custody architecture and the hardware security layer that underpins asset management at scale.

Stablecoin and payments dynamics will be explored through Tether, StraitsX, Steakhouse Financial, Stable, and makebanc, mapping what comes after stablecoins' rise to payments dominance — from regional payment rails and APAC market penetration to DeFi-native financial design. The DeFi infrastructure perspective is reinforced by STON.fi's keynote on cross-chain liquidity, while Chainlink brings the oracle and cross-chain connectivity layer into the Mainstream Web3 Adoption discussion.

Rounding out the programme, the Agentic AI panel brings together MetaMask, AI PET, Velvet, AEON, Rewardy Wallet, and TiDB of PingCAP, grounding the trillion-dollar agentic economy thesis in real infrastructure, payment rails, and consumer application development. A roundtable on the agentic economy featuring Animoca Brands, Offchain Labs, Zero Gravity Labs, and Serotonin will see the strategic and philosophical stakes of autonomous on-chain agents debated by those actively building the conditions for them to exist.