ETHSpain 2026 Puts Infrastructure at the Center of Ethereum’s Next Chapter

ETHSpain’s Barcelona debut focused on the infrastructure needed to move blockchain further into real-world use, spanning Ethereum security, European regulation, stablecoin payment rails and tokenized markets.

ETHSpain brought Ethereum builders, infrastructure providers, policy experts and financial industry representatives together in Barcelona on September 17 for a one-day conference held alongside European Blockchain Convention week.

Rather than focusing on markets or token prices, the agenda centered on Ethereum’s technical and practical development. Security, regulation, stablecoins, payments, staking and tokenized assets dominated the discussion, all circling the same question: which infrastructure still needs to be built before blockchain-based systems can run reliably at scale.

Ethereum security becomes an infrastructure question

One of the opening keynotes returned to a defining event in Ethereum’s history. Griff Green, curator of TheDAO Security Fund, presented “How a $150M Hack Became a War Chest for Ethereum Security,” revisiting The DAO and what happened to the funds left over from its 2016 recovery.

The DAO raised more than $150 million worth of ETH before the exploit that ultimately led to Ethereum’s historic hard fork. A decade later, TheDAO Security Fund is using those unclaimed funds as a long-term security endowment, directing staking rewards toward security research and infrastructure.

The topic continued in the “Who Secures Ethereum: Staking, Nodes & Infrastructure” panel, where representatives from OpenZeppelin, Stakely, MigaLabs and Hacken discussed the less visible systems behind Ethereum security, from staking economics to node operations and infrastructure dependencies.

Together, the two sessions cast Ethereum security as long-term infrastructure work: funding that outlasts any single exploit, and staking and node operations that need ongoing attention rather than a one-time fix.

Stablecoins move from asset to payment rail

Payments formed another major part of the program. Performa CPO Tim Akhtyamov’s keynote, “Programmable Payments: Building the Institutional Rails for Stablecoins,” examined the infrastructure developing around stablecoin-based business payments.

As stablecoins move further into business use, the focus is shifting from the asset itself toward the financial stack around it. Businesses need blockchain settlement to connect with liquidity, compliance, fiat on- and off-ramps, treasury management and the systems they already use to receive and send money.

The same theme appeared in “Payments On Chain,” where Performa Head of Business Development Anna Tobin joined representatives from Bitvavo, the Japan Cryptoasset Business Association and other industry participants to discuss real-world adoption of stablecoins and onchain payment rails.

Regulation was closely connected to that conversation. Tobin also joined “Ethereum Under the Law: MiCA and What Comes Next,” alongside representatives from the Slovenian government, 1inch and the European Ethereum Institute.

Across these discussions, payment adoption depended on more than speed or lower transaction costs: compliance, familiar workflows and reliable connections between onchain infrastructure and existing financial operations mattered just as much.

What comes after tokenization?

Another keynote looked past simply bringing assets onchain. Brickken CEO Edwin Mata explored this in “Post Tokenization: The Birth of Agentic Capital Markets.” His argument centered on what comes after tokenization itself: making onchain assets readable and actionable by software through machine-readable rules, digital vaults and authorized agents operating within predefined compliance boundaries.

That goes beyond creating digital representations of financial assets. The next challenge is building the standards, permissions and infrastructure that let those assets interact with automated financial systems.

From experimentation to infrastructure

ETHSpain’s sessions covered different parts of Ethereum, but they converged on one point: the underlying technology is no longer the only challenge. Attention is moving toward the infrastructure around it — security, regulation, payments, interoperability and usability.

In Barcelona, that meant focusing on the practical systems needed to turn blockchain into infrastructure that can support financial activity at scale, not on what Ethereum might eventually enable.