Twenty fifteen-minute meetings with pre-qualified investors, two days behind closed doors, no exhibition booth to hide behind. The Global Blockchain Congress London runs on 3 and 4 September 2026 at the Hilton London Bankside, weeks before Britain opens its crypto licensing window. Cryptofocus is a media partner, so you know what to expect: the best possible coverage.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1The 2nd European Global Blockchain Congress takes over the Hilton London Bankside in Southwark on Thursday 3 and Friday 4 September 2026, by invitation only. |
| 2We counted 48 speakers published on the programme on 14 August, among them Coinbase UK boss Keith Grose, Nomura's Laser Digital, Galaxy, Wintermute and the fund that used to be Binance Labs. |
| 3The published schedule reserves 20 one-on-one slots of 15 minutes, which is five hours of the two-day clock spent face to face with capital. |
| 4The date is the sweetener: the FCA opens its cryptoasset authorisation gateway on 30 September, 26 days after the congress packs up. |
Five hours of the clock go to one-on-ones
Most crypto conferences sell you a stage and hope you find the right person in the coffee queue. Agora Group, the Fujairah-based organiser, builds the whole thing around the meeting table instead. Count the blocks on the published London programme and the format gives itself away: seven one-on-ones before lunch on day one, five more in the late afternoon, another eight on Friday morning. That is 20 slots of 15 minutes, five hours of scheduled deal talk inside a congress that opens at 08:30 on the Thursday and closes with an awards ceremony on Friday afternoon.
The stage content sits around those meetings rather than the other way round. Nine panel sessions carry the themes the organisers set out in their release, from market structure and derivatives flows through the tokenisation of real-world assets to DeFi’s institutional turn and the machine economy of AI agents and DePIN networks. Friday’s closing panel takes on the question every fund in the room is paid to answer, which the programme puts bluntly as where smart money is positioning for the next cycle.
Who the Global Blockchain Congress London has on the list
We counted the names published on the event site on 14 August and got to 48, with the lineup still filling. Keith Grose, Coinbase’s UK chief executive, is on it. So is Andrea Vianelli, who runs asset-management operations at Laser Digital, the digital-assets arm of Nomura, and Andrew Lace of Galaxy, and two people from Wintermute, the London market maker and OTC desk.
On the capital side the roster reads like a fundraising target list. Alex Odagiu represents YZi Labs, the fund rebranded from Binance Labs into the family office of Changpeng Zhao and Yi He. Cheryl Chan comes from Dragonfly Capital, Sebastian Blum from Greenfield, James Newman runs Republic’s venture arm in Europe, and Danish Chaudhry of Paper Ventures is one of the London funds the organisers name in their own release. Dutch readers get a familiar face too: Marc de Kloe of Amsterdam’s Theta Capital, who has been putting money into blockchain funds since 2018.
Two names widen the room beyond dealmaking. Anna Irrera, senior editor for digital finance at Bloomberg News, brings the press bench inside. Dr Lisa Cameron sat in the Commons from 2015 to 2024 and chaired the UK Parliament’s first crypto group, which published its 2023 inquiry into Britain’s global-hub ambition. She now runs the UK/US Crypto Alliance, and the question that report asked is the one Britain starts answering this autumn.
The FCA clock is the real reason September matters
Here is the bit no press release spells out. On 30 June the FCA published its final rules for the UK cryptoasset regime, and with them the calendar every firm in Britain is now working to. The authorisation gateway opens on 30 September 2026 and shuts on 28 February 2027. Firms that get an application in during that window can keep operating under a transitional regime while it is assessed. The regime itself bites on 25 October 2027.
Do the arithmetic and the September date stops looking like a coincidence. The congress closes on the Friday, and 26 days later the queue for a UK licence forms. Anyone weighing a London entity or a British distribution deal has roughly one month of decision time left when they walk into Southwark. “We’ve created a framework that doesn’t force firms to choose between regulatory certainty and room to innovate,” said David Geale, the FCA’s executive director of payments and digital finance. Compare that with the continent, where more than a thousand EU crypto firms are still without a MiCA licence, and you understand why the UK panel opens the programme.
The Bank of England is still taking comments on stablecoins
The stablecoin panel on day one lands mid-consultation, which makes it worth more than the usual survey of payment rails. On 22 June the Bank of England published its policy statement and draft Code of Practice for systemic sterling stablecoins. It dropped the individual holding limits it had consulted on and replaced them with a temporary issuance guardrail of Ā£40 billion per systemic coin. It also raised the share of reserves an issuer may park in short-term UK government debt from 60 to 70 percent, with the rest sitting at the Bank so redemptions clear fast.
Comments close on 22 September, 18 days after the congress ends, and the Bank intends to finalise the Code before the year is out. “Innovation thrives on trust,” said Sarah Breeden, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, calling the package a world-leading regime. Coinbase has OcĆ©ane Codjia on the list, who leads its EMEA go-to-market for payments and stablecoin infrastructure, so the people who will live with those reserve rules are in the room while the ink is still wet.
London has done this before, in the same hotel
The first European edition ran on 24 and 25 July 2023 at this same Bankside address, themed around DeFi, gaming, the metaverse and NFTs, and Agora’s own announcement that year promised more than 100 investors and 15 projects across two days. Across all 18 editions in Dubai, Vietnam, Singapore and London, the organisers count more than 5,200 attendees, over 5,750 pre-arranged one-on-ones and upwards of 1,850 investors. Those are their figures, not ours, and the calibre they point to is visible in the alumni list: OKX’s MENA chief executive, DMCC’s executive chairman and partners from Foresight, Lemniscap and The Spartan Group have all taken the GBC stage.
If you want to see what the room actually looks like before you commit a Thursday and a Friday to it, the organisers’ recap of the 15th edition does the job better than any floorplan.
How to get in
Entry is by invitation, which is the whole point of the format and also the catch. Projects are pre-qualified before they are handed a meeting schedule, investors register through a separate route, and sponsors take the presentation slots. All three doors sit on gbc-london.com, and the organisers take enquiries at info@agoragroup.ae. The address to put in your calendar is the Hilton London Bankside, 2-8 Great Suffolk Street, SE1 0UG, a short walk from Tate Modern and the river.
We are covering this one as a media partner, which means we get the schedule early and you get the reporting. It also means we say so on the page. Our diary is filling up either way: the Amsterdam Fintech Event in October is the other date we have circled this autumn. London first, though, with the licence queue forming right behind it.
