TOKEN2049 Singapore kicks off October 7 at Marina Bay Sands with a speaker list that puts traditional finance chiefs and crypto protocol founders on the same stages. Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman, BlackRock Director of Digital Assets Nikhil Sharma, Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, and Morgan Stanley Head of Digital Asset Strategy Amy Oldenburg are all confirmed. So are Hyperliquid Labs' Jeff Yan, Base's Jesse Pollak, the Solana Foundation's Lily Liu, Polygon Foundation's Sandeep Nailwal, and Joseph Lubin under Ethereum and MetaMask.
Wall Street on the main stage
The first morning opens with Balaji Srinivasan's keynote, 'The Open Source Network State,' from 9:10 to 9:30 a.m. on the OKX Main Stage, right after the 9:00 welcome. From there the day leans toward the institutional crowd: 'Wall St. 2049: Everything Trades, Nobody Sleeps,' 'The New Trilemma: Confidential, Compliant, Composable,' and 'Onchain Options, Derivatives and the US Market' are all on the schedule.
The most pointed session is 'DeFi's Institutional Breakthrough,' running 10:20 to 11:00 a.m. on the OKX Main Stage. Aave Labs' Stani Kulechov, Ethena Labs' Guy Young, and Infinex/Synthetix founder Kain Warwick are set to speak, with a16z crypto's Robbie Petersen moderating. That's four people who spend their days building or funding the infrastructure that BlackRock and Franklin Templeton executives are now being asked to use.
Hyperliquid gets its own slot
Immediately after, from 11:00 to 11:35 a.m. on the same stage, Hyperliquid CEO Jeff Yan takes a solo session titled 'Hyperliquid: Rebuilding Finance from First Principles.' The placement is notable. Hyperliquid has drawn attention from traditional market data channels, including separate reporting that examined Hyperliquid data in Bloomberg Terminal. That reporting does not confirm any commercial relationship between Hyperliquid and the firms represented at the conference. Still, a dedicated main-stage slot for a perpetuals protocol CEO, wedged between a DeFi panel and a Wall Street lineup, says something about where the conference organizers see the audience's attention.
A second day behind closed doors
October 8 brings TOKEN2049 Institutional, described as a private, invitation-based gathering for senior leaders across global finance and digital assets. No agenda or speaker list for that day has been released. The main conference, meanwhile, keeps OKX as Title Sponsor for the fifth consecutive year — a run that predates most of the current institutional push.
The conference runs two days. The sessions above are scheduled, not guaranteed; speaker lineups at events this size tend to shift. What's confirmed is the room: the same Marina Bay Sands halls where, starting Tuesday morning, a Nasdaq chair and a Hyperliquid founder will be working from the same program.
