IBW 2026 Agenda

Welcome to IBW 2026 (opens in IBW Connect)

• Karthik SelvarajHead of Events & Operations, Hashed Emergent

How India Wins Really Big - Why India Matters More in the New Economy (opens in IBW Connect)

• Tak LeeCEO & Managing Partner, Hashed Emergent

India Landscape Report Launch 2026 (opens in IBW Connect)

• Sharanya SahaiInvestments, Hashed Emergent

Fireside with Binance (opens in IBW Connect)

• SB SekerHead of APAC, Binance

From Crypto Counters to Capital Markets: Can Exchanges Bring RWAs to Indian Retail? (opens in IBW Connect)

Indian retail has been locked out of most of global capital markets: US equities, treasuries, private credit, even gold at scale, all gated by minimums, intermediaries or regulation. Tokenization collapses those barriers, and centralized exchanges already hold the users, the KYC rails and the fiat on-ramps to deliver it. The leaders of India’s largest exchanges and Binance’s APAC business discuss how RWAs move from narrative to product on their platforms, what TradFi and DeFi actually look like when merged on an exchange balance sheet, and whether regulators will let the first truly inclusive asset class ship from India.

• SB SekerHead of APAC, Binance
• Ashish SinghalCo-founder, CoinSwitch and Lemonn
• Sumit GuptaCo-founder, CoinDCX
• Edul PatelCo-founder & CEO, Mudrex and Saber Money

Tokenizing India’s Balance Sheet: Gold, Land and Bonds On-Chain (opens in IBW Connect)

India holds an estimated 25,000 tonnes of household gold, trillions of dollars of illiquid real estate and a corporate bond market that retail barely touches. The previous panel asked how exchanges will distribute tokenized assets. This one asks who will create them. A gold-backed token issuer, a regulated tokenization infrastructure builder and an enterprise tokenization platform discuss which Indian assets are worth putting on-chain first, what the legal wrapper and custody stack actually look like, and whether India’s regulatory environment lets any of this be issued from here or forces the supply side offshore.

• Mahek KewlaniRegional Director MENA, BIGOD
• Tajinder VirkFounder & CEO, Blockmaze
• Manish TewariCEO, Spydra

No Star, No Fee, No Media Plan, One 400 Crore Blockbuster: What Hanuman Ansh Proves About Attention When AI Makes Intelligence Abundant (opens in IBW Connect)

Hanuman Ansh was made for around Rs 2 crore with no stars, a director who took no fee, and a marketing spend smaller than most films’ trailer launch. It could not get screens in week one. It has since grossed over Rs 400 crore worldwide on the back of bhandaras, viral devotional reels, word of mouth and a lean team doing a marketing department’s job with a handful of people and tools. In this fireside, writer-director-producer Vishal Chaturvedi breaks down what actually did the work, where the money went, why he chose profit share over a fee, and what he will do differently on the sequel now that making a film is cheaper and winning attention is harder. A preview of the Future Asset Forum conversation on Day 2: when intelligence is abundant, what is the asset you are really building?

CoinDCX Presentation (opens in IBW Connect)

• Sumit GuptaCo-founder, CoinDCX

The Stablecoin Stack: Emerging-Market Rails, What Is Missing (opens in IBW Connect)

Stablecoins have moved from a crypto trading instrument to a settlement layer carrying real payment volume, and the sharpest adoption is in emerging markets where banking rails are slow, expensive or simply absent. Africa has already built stablecoin infrastructure that fintechs use without touching a blockchain themselves. India, the world’s largest remittance market, has UPI at home, an LRS cap abroad and a regulator that has not said yes. A Lagos infrastructure founder, an India cross-border fintech founder and a growth investor discuss what stablecoin rails actually do for a market, why India’s path will look nothing like Africa’s, and where the money is being deployed.

• Sitashwa SrivastavaFounder & CEO, Borderless
• Abdulfatai SuleimanCo-Founder & CEO, Blockradar
• Shravya AggarwalInvestor, Norwest Venture Partners

Fireside with Avalanche (opens in IBW Connect)

• Devika MittalRegional Head, Ava Labs

Blockmaze Presentation (opens in IBW Connect)

• Tajinder VirkFounder & CEO, Blockmaze

A tale of two strategies: why is there divergence in liquid crypto and venture opportunities (opens in IBW Connect)

For most of crypto’s history, venture and liquid returns moved together: back the protocol early, hold the token, ride the cycle. That correlation broke. This cycle, the majors and a few public-market equity exits delivered, while a generation of venture-backed token launches listed at inflated valuations and bled out. LPs are asking why they should lock capital for ten years when the liquid market is right there. Four investors spanning prop trading, pure early-stage venture, ecosystem funds and Ethereum infrastructure debate what actually went wrong, whether equity has quietly replaced tokens as the venture exit, and what a crypto fund should look like for the next cycle.

• Doug HsuInvestor, CMT Digital
• Praneeth SrikantiInvestment Partner, Ethereal Ventures
• Amit MehraGeneral Partner, BORDΞRLΞSS Capital
• Tobias BauerGeneral Partner & Co-Founder, TBV (TB Ventures)

From Hackathon to Mainnet: How India’s Builders Are Shipping, and What the Ecosystems Owe Them (opens in IBW Connect)

India produces more new Web3 developers every year than any other country, and more of them are reaching mainnet than ever: payments, DePIN, consumer apps, infrastructure. The gap is no longer talent; it is the distance between a winning hackathon build and a product with users, and who carries a team across it. A Layer 1 foundation that has rebuilt its stack around AI, an execution layer designed from scratch for performance, and a third ecosystem voice talk about what Indian teams are actually putting into production, what support made the difference, how AI tooling is changing what a two-person team can ship, and what a builder in Bangalore should expect from an ecosystem before taking its grant. Moderated by a founder who left ecosystem developer relations to build infrastructure for the next generation of builders.

• Nick DodsonCo-Founder & CEO, Fuel Network
• Harshit TiwariVP of Growth, NEAR Foundation

Day 1 Wrap-up and Day 2 Preview by Crypto Addy (opens in IBW Connect)

• Aditya SinghCo-Founder, Crypto India

Opening note (opens in IBW Connect)

• Nishtha UpadhyayLegal Counsel, Hashed Emergent

Opening Keynote/Inaugural address (opens in IBW Connect)

Banking the Non-Human Client: AI x Payments (opens in IBW Connect)

AI agents are beginning to do more than answer questions: they negotiate, trade, buy services, and allocate capital without human approval at every step. Stripe and Coinbase have launched payment rails for machines; Pine Labs has entered the space. But India's KYC framework has no onboarding route for an autonomous agent. As machines start paying machines, the opportunity extends beyond payments to identity, compliance, custody, and credit, and to the institutions that will bank the non-human economy. Discussion points: What agentic commerce actually looks like today: real transaction volumes, real use cases The KYC problem: how do you onboard a client that isn't a person or a legal entity? x402 and Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol, and what an Indian equivalent would require Where the liability sits when an agent transacts badly: bank, developer, or principal? Is this a 2027 revenue line for Indian banks and payment companies, or a 2030 one?

• Amit DasCo-founder & CEO, Think360
• Ashutosh DubeyHead of Innovation, Jio Financial Services
• Vishal GuptaDirector of Engineering, Blockchain and Digital Assets, Mastercard

Code, Capital, Compliance: How Indian Law Reads Smart Contracts and Tokenised Assets (opens in IBW Connect)

Smart contracts and tokenisation are creating new possibilities for financial markets, but their adoption depends on how they interact with India's existing legal framework. From the enforceability of on-chain transactions to the treatment of tokenised assets under securities, property and foreign exchange laws, several questions remain open. This panel brings together leading legal practitioners to examine how Indian law applies to smart contracts and tokenised assets, where regulatory and legal uncertainties remain, and what changes are needed to enable institutional adoption.

• Jaideep ReddyPartner, Trilegal
• Suril DesaiLeader - Disruptive Technologies Practice, Nishith Desai Associates

Issue, Hold, Distribute: Who Builds India's Tokenisation Value Chain? (opens in IBW Connect)

Tokenisation isn't one product. It's a chain. An asset has to be structured and tokenised, it has to be held securely, and it has to reach investors who can buy, trade and exit. In most markets one of these links is still missing, and that missing link is what stops tokenisation from scaling. This session brings together three operators who each own a different part of that chain: a tokenisation platform issuing real-world assets through GIFT City, an institutional custody provider, and one of India's largest digital asset investment platforms. Together they trace a single tokenised asset from creation to investor portfolio, covering how it gets structured and issued, how it's custodied, and how it finally reaches the people who buy it. The session closes on a straight question: which link in India's chain is weakest today, and who fixes it?

• Shaan ZaveriDesignated Partner, Terazo
• Manhar GaregratSVP, Country Head, India & Global Partnerships, Liminal Custody
• Edul PatelCo-founder & CEO, Mudrex and Saber Money

Follow the Wallet: Cybercrime, Custody and Recovery in Digital Assets (opens in IBW Connect)

Every digital asset story has a quieter one running underneath it: the fake trading app, the mule account chain, the funds converted to crypto and gone across borders before anyone files a report. India has seen both the scale and the damage, from retail scams to one of the largest exchange hacks in the world. This session puts the people who chase these cases, and the people who have to secure the assets in the first place, in the same room. It covers how a digital asset crime actually moves from complaint to wallet freeze, where the trail goes cold, and what police, banks, exchanges and the FIU would each need to change for recovery to stop being a race the criminals usually win.

Crossing Borders: International Taxation of Digital Assets (opens in IBW Connect)

A token has no fixed home. The platform is offshore, the counterparty is non-resident, the wallet is self-custodied, and the Indian investor still has to file a return. India answered the domestic question with a flat 30 percent and a 1 percent TDS, but the cross-border questions are still open: where income arises, who deducts, how a treaty reads a token, and what India's new information-exchange commitments mean for anyone holding assets abroad. This session works through the principles that apply today and the ones that will bite from 2027, covering foreign exchanges, staking and DeFi yield, GIFT City structures, and what investors and platforms should be getting right now rather than scrambling for later.

Lights, Camera, Token: Tokenising Film and Creative IP (opens in IBW Connect)

India produces more films than any country on earth, and most of that IP sits in private catalogues, financed informally, with royalties no one can easily track. Tokenisation offers a different model: fractional film financing, royalties distributed on-chain, and verifiable provenance for a catalogue. Maharashtra, with the country's largest film ecosystem and a state-run Film City, is one of the few places that could actually pilot it. This session brings the government, the producers and the legal view together on what a film IP token would really represent, what the Copyright Act and securities law demand before it can be sold, how royalties would flow and be audited, and what a careful public-sector pilot would need to get right from day one.

Day 1 Close (opens in IBW Connect)

Summary of the day and preview of Day 2.