The Global Blockchain Congress London programme is now published in full, and it settles what these two days in Southwark are. Eighteen fifteen-minute meetings with pre-qualified investors take more of the clock than the entire panel stage. Thursday 3 and Friday 4 September, by application only. Cryptofocus is a media partner, so you get the schedule read properly.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1The 2nd European edition runs at the Hilton London Bankside on Thursday 3 and Friday 4 September 2026, and the way in is an application form rather than a ticket sale. |
| 2Counted off the published schedule on 21 August: 18 numbered one-on-one slots of 15 minutes, 270 minutes in all, against 250 minutes across nine panel sessions. |
| 3Of the 47 speakers now listed, 27 come from firms whose business is deploying capital, spread across 27 separate funds, family offices and investment managers. |
| 4Treat it as a fundraising floor with a stage attached, and get the application in early, because the doors open in 13 days. |
The man who runs it thinks conferences are broken
Hadi Malaeb opens day one from the chair. He co-founded Agora Group, he has spent more than two decades in the conference business, and he built this particular format because he concluded that the ordinary one fails the people who need it most. He said so plainly in an interview filmed on day two of the Dubai edition and published by Web3 TV on 31 October 2025.
Large conferences and exhibitions are great for branding and networking and thought leadership positioning, but they do very little when it comes to fundraising.
Hadi Malaeb, co-founder and CEO, Agora Group
Everything else he says in that interview follows from it. He keeps the number of editions down on purpose, because “we don’t want to dilute the format”, and he chooses the summer host city by counting money rather than crowds. London won the international slot for the reason you would expect. “We look at the concentration of investors first and foremost,” he says, “because the companies that want to meet the investor can come from anywhere in the world.”
What the Global Blockchain Congress London programme adds up to
A thesis is cheap. A timetable is not, because every minute you give one thing is a minute taken from another. So we counted the schedule published on the congress site as it stood on 21 August, block by block.
The organisers number the meetings, which makes the sum easy to check. Seven run before lunch on the Thursday, five more in the late afternoon, six on the Friday morning: 18 slots of 15 minutes. Multiply them out and you get 270 minutes, exactly the length of the three blocks the schedule reserves. Nine panel sessions come to 250 minutes. Five presentations add 55 more. The meeting rooms beat the main stage on the clock, and they do it on a schedule the organisers wrote themselves.
How the pacing changes between the days
Thursday front-loads the pitching. After the welcome at 10:00 comes a run of short presentations, ten to fifteen minutes each, from Animoca Brands, Liquid Loans, DeFi Technologies and Solarious, with a ten-minute session on Britain’s financial future carrying the name of Coinbase’s UK chief executive Keith Grose. The site labels one of those slots a Strategic Partner Presentation, so you can see which pitch is commercial before you sit down for it. The afternoon then turns into three consecutive thirty-minute panels on market structure, tokenisation and stablecoins.
Friday drops the pitch format almost entirely and runs five panels instead, closing with the congress awards between 16:00 and 16:30. If you are attending for the stage rather than the meetings, Friday is the day worth clearing.
Twenty-seven of the 47 names are there to deploy capital
We went through every speaker profile the congress publishes on the same date and counted 47. Then we sorted them by what their firm actually does with money, counting only venture funds, family offices and investment managers. That gives 27 of the 47, drawn from 27 different houses, so more than half the published lineup is sitting on the buy side.
The panel line-ups are published now too, and they reward a read. Anna Irrera, Bloomberg’s senior editor for digital finance, moderates the Thursday market-structure panel with Galaxy, Wintermute, Glassnode and Hilbert Group alongside her. Hilbert is represented by its chief executive Barnali Biswal, who spent fourteen years at Goldman Sachs in London running its European high-yield credit trading business and a portfolio above a billion dollars, according to the company’s own announcement of her appointment.
Friday opens with Caroline Thomsen of RockawayX in the chair, and the congress profile puts her firm above two billion dollars across venture, credit, liquidity and infrastructure. The closing session asks where smart money is positioning for 2026 and seats Alex Odagiu of YZi Labs next to Francesco Filia of Fasanara Capital, Joscha Kuplewatzky of Wintermute Ventures and Varun Datta of Truth Ventures. Dutch readers get a familiar name in between: Marc de Kloe of Amsterdam’s Theta Capital sits on the Friday morning panel, and Andrea Vianelli of Laser Digital, the digital-assets arm of Nomura, takes the tokenisation slot on Thursday.
There is no ticket page, only an application
Look for a price and you will not find one. The congress publishes no ticket tiers and no early-bird ladder. Its own Register Now button and the link the organisers are circulating both land on the same place, an application form for the 2nd European edition that asks for seven things: your name, your company, your position, a business email typed twice, and a mobile number. The pre-qualification the whole format rests on happens after that form goes in, which is why there is no checkout.
That gate is the reason the ratio above holds. Projects arrive with a meeting schedule already built, investors come through a separate route, and nobody wanders in off Great Suffolk Street. It also means the useful thing you can do today is apply, because thirteen days is not long to build eighteen meetings around a stranger.
Timing sharpens it further. The congress packs up weeks before Britain opens its cryptoasset authorisation gateway, which is why we read this edition against the UK regulatory clock when the dates were first announced. Anyone weighing a London entity walks into Southwark with roughly a month of decision time left.
We say that on the page because you should know it. Cryptofocus sits on the congress’s media partner wall next to Cointelegraph and crypto.news, we get the schedule early, and you get it counted rather than retyped. The address for your calendar is the Hilton London Bankside, 2-8 Great Suffolk Street, SE1 0UG, a few minutes from Tate Modern.
Our autumn diary runs on from there to the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona a fortnight later, and to the Amsterdam Fintech Event in October. London comes first, and it is the one where the meetings are already on a timetable with your name waiting for a slot on it.
Partner disclosure: CryptoFocus is a media partner of the Global Blockchain Congress. This commercial relationship gives us access to event materials but does not determine our editorial conclusions.
