- 1 day ago
Europe has talent, capital, and ambition, yet its most promising startups still struggle to scale, or leave. Somewhere between early growth and global scale, momentum is lost. Why? The reasons are debated: fragmented markets, regulatory complexity, access to capital. New ideas like the 28th regime aim to simplify this path and reduce friction across borders. Yet the question remains whether structural change can keep up with the speed at which companies need to grow. Is Europe solving the right problem? And what would it take to turn a strong startup ecosystem into a true scale-up economy?
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00:00Welcome to Viva Tech 2026. Now, are you ready? Yes? Okay. Good to have that energy early here.
00:13Now, this is really a special year. It is Viva Tech's 10-year anniversary. My name is Ariane
00:22Alcorta. I'm an international journalist on moderator, and I'll be your host here on stage
00:28one. Now, I want you to think about this. Ten years ago, Viva Tech started with a bet that
00:37innovation deserved a bigger stage. Fast forward to today, I think it's safe to say that that bet
00:44paid off. I mean, I'm talking about 180,000 attendees. We have 14,000 startups and people
00:55from 170 countries. Since 2016, Viva Tech has grown into Europe's landmark innovation event
01:06where we don't just celebrate innovation. We take it a step further. We decide what is next.
01:14Now, for everyone watching us online, welcome. And so do tell your friends, colleagues, and
01:23anyone else who forgot to book a ticket, that they can also watch us live via vivatech.com
01:30slash live. Now, over the years, this stage has seen some pretty memorable guests. We've had
01:40Mark Zuckerberg. We've had Elon Musk. We had Jensen Huang from NVIDIA. And this year, we're going
01:48even bigger. And we're adding a few more names to that list. Now, we've also spent a decade
01:57spotlighting countries going above and beyond innovation. We've had Canada and Japan in past
02:04recent years. And this year, the big winner is Germany. So do keep an eye out for their booth
02:11in the exhibition hall. Trust me, it's a bit hard to miss. Now, because we're turning 10 years
02:19this year, and this only happens once, we have decided to scatter around some golden tickets
02:28around Viva Tech that can unlock some pretty incredible prices. And some of those golden tickets,
02:35you can already start finding underneath your seats. So go ahead, check, take a look, see if
02:45you're one of the lucky ones. Check carefully and show us if you are a winner. Oh, we found one
02:53right
02:53here. Okay. We found one here. Is there another one? Not yet? Okay, so do redeem those prizes.
03:02I'm really curious to see what you want. Now, for those of you who, oh, there's another one there.
03:09You have a ticket. Great. Okay. For those of you who didn't get a ticket, well, you're still at Viva
03:16Tech, right? So I think that's a pretty good consolation prize right there. Because I mean here,
03:22more seriously, whether this is your 10th Viva Tech or your first, this is a stage where we have
03:30the conversations that matter. And I'm talking from AI and digital sovereignty to talent, finance,
03:37and the future of business, all alongside the brightest minds. Speaking of which,
03:46what a better topic to start the morning with, with something that affects us all. I'm talking about
03:53money. Now, the way money moves is changing faster than we can ever realize. Stable coins, tokenization,
04:04digital financial rails, all terms that sounded like buzzwords years ago, but that today they're
04:11being taken very, very seriously by the largest financial institutions. To explore where this is
04:19all headed, we're joined by two people helping shape that future. And I'm talking about Jeremy Allaire,
04:26CEO of Circle and Rob Goldston, CEO of BlackRock. Now pay attention carefully because this is more than
04:34just a crypto story. This is a conversation of the future architecture of finance. That said, do prepare
04:44to welcome Jeremy, Rob, and Arjun to the stage.
05:10Good. Thank you so much for that introduction. And thank you all for joining us. Look at this,
05:14full house, day one. Absolutely incredible energy here. Let's kick off this discussion. Rob, can I
05:19start with you? You know, you've described finance as entering another major infrastructure transition.
05:25What effectively does that look like for you? And what's changed to allow that to happen now?
05:30We're starting with the simple questions. Is that what's happening? Simple questions.
05:35Can you guys hear me okay? No. We're just having some audio issues. Rob's mic, try again.
05:42Can you guys hear me okay now? No. This technology thing never seems to work.
05:50Whilst we get a mic, here it comes. Amazing. Thank you. Can you guys hear me now? There we go.
05:58Awesome. So I think if we take a step back, and it's like what we were talking about earlier.
06:05As the technology reporter, we're here talking about digital assets. And I'm very deliberate in calling
06:13it digital assets, not crypto, not blockchain. Because effectively, you have a better, faster,
06:21cheaper technology innovation that could solve real world problems today. I think that one of the
06:28big, big, big, big traps that people often fall into is they assume it's binary. That tomorrow,
06:37everything is going to switch. The capital markets are almost $200 trillion. That they'll just magically
06:43switch to this new infrastructure. It'll be much more gradual than that. But there are many use cases
06:51and many opportunities where the underlying technology of digital assets, the underlying technology of
06:59crypto enable efficiencies. And some of them are very basic, even moving cash, which obviously we have
07:08the world's leading expert on. But even moving cash today is shockingly cumbersome. And this provides an
07:16opportunity to take out those frictions. Jeremy, based on what Rob says, when we talk, and you often
07:22talk about the internet financial system, what are the technologies that are enabling this? And sort of
07:29big picture, what does that look like for you? Yeah, you know, it's been, it's been an interesting
07:35evolution. You know, we got started building in this space like 13 years ago. And the technology was very
07:41primitive. I think kind of fast forward to where we are today, you know, one of the ideas that we
07:46had very early was that these, these networks, you know, blockchain networks would basically become
07:52operating systems. And I think, you know, at a conference like Viva Tech, it's always about what
07:58are the new platforms? What are the new devices? What are the new paradigms? We've seen this maturation.
08:04And we're now at a point where these are economic operating systems. They're general purpose computers
08:10that can run economic activity. That can mean this, the sort of representation of value,
08:17these assets, it could mean the contracts that actually go into commerce, go into financial
08:23arrangements, it could mean, you know, with the economy is governed, there's governance, all these
08:27things can be basically brought and built on these new on these new systems. And I think from a
08:34technology perspective, you know, we're now in the fourth generation of that, we've seen a maturation,
08:39sort of like we went from, you know, personal computers to mobile, we went from dial up to
08:45broadband, we're in this new capacity. Last thing I would note, though, is that what's happening right
08:50now is this collision between operating systems for intelligence and economic operating systems.
08:59And these are colliding. And the force of that collision, I think, is going to create one of the
09:04most dramatic new platform shifts in the history of technology, in the history of the internet,
09:09and in the history of the global economy. Just to unpack that a bit, Jeremy, what you're alluding
09:13to here is the rise of agentic AI. We hear a lot about these agents that are able to perhaps
09:19work
09:19slightly more autonomously, able to carry out complex tasks on our behalf. You talked about this
09:26collision between the two worlds. What does that mean in practice in terms of where things like
09:29USDC where the blockchain fits into all of this? I mean, essentially, if you look at what's
09:34happening right now, and this is accelerating at an extraordinary pace, cognitive work is being
09:40broken down into AI agents. And cognitive work is the substance of most modern corporations.
09:48It is the substance of basically all professional services firms. And cognitive work powers an enormous
09:54amount of the economy. That work is going to be transformed into agents. And those agents are
10:00going to be highly specialized. And those agents are going to collaborate with each other. They're
10:04going to transact with each other. They're going to enter into economic contracts with each other,
10:09within boundaries of a corporation and across the boundaries of a corporation. And you need an
10:14infrastructure to do that. You need an infrastructure to actually settle those contracts. That is,
10:19you know, something that everyone can see and trust and validate and audit. And you need money
10:24that works at agent scale. You need money that can move at the speed of the internet in fractions of
10:30a second. And the economics of this are very different. The inference cost for a specialized agent
10:36doing, say, intellectual property analysis, pick some category, might be five cents. It might be 10 cents.
10:42It might be a dollar. And so you need an economic system that can support that. And so it's that
10:48kind of connection between those two worlds that we see as accelerative to the adoption of
10:55things like stable coins, blockchain networks more broadly. And if I could just add on that, because
11:02I think one of the terms that used to be used all the time a few years ago and has
11:09sort of faded away a
11:10bit is the concept of a smart contract. Yeah. And if you think about what's happened through
11:16the new agentic AI and just broadly through language-based AI is one of the primary use cases
11:24is it could read and it could write. So the smart contract was effectively codifying
11:33something that would require a human to interpret and then putting it into code.
11:39So if you just put a fine point on it, you could take the code and you could use it
11:48to have economic
11:49value transfer. In a world where you have agents doing activity, they're not going to log into a bank
11:57account. They're not going to go to the web, log into a bank account and move money. They need their
12:02own
12:02set of rails. So I actually, where Jeremy and I may have a slightly different perspective,
12:10I don't think it's a collision. I think they're force multipliers. Yes. And that is like a particle
12:16collision. It makes a big bang. Well, nuclear. They're like two sides of the same coin. And the whole
12:24concept of a smart contract, I think was looking for more use cases. I think AI is the ultimate use
12:33case. So smart contracts will still exist? Yes. But with the... The smart contracts will effectively
12:42be what the agents create to manage and monitor and supervise value transfer. What does that mean then
12:51for this journey? Sorry, go ahead, Rob. Like, let me give you a direct example.
12:55My daughter just graduated university. I had the job of having all the parents give me the money for
13:04rent for the house that she shared with other girls and then paying it to the landlord. The reality is
13:13that's crazy that it requires everyone to do that every month. As opposed to you take a lease,
13:23you put it in one of these language models, let's say ChatGPT, you ask it, is this a good lease?
13:30What
13:31should I change? And then it comes back, you manage it, it says this is a good lease. And then
13:39you say,
13:41pay it, you know, effectively create a mechanism such that you're paying the rent, you're asking other
13:47people for the money they need to contribute. And all of that happens automatically consistent with
13:53the contract. Completely. Yeah. You know, we have this concept of generative AI and it generates code,
14:00it generates written content, but generative contracts will be possible. And because AI
14:07AI can write code perfectly, nearly, effectively, like these generative contracts will exist,
14:15and you'll be able to take intent, the intent is this economic arrangement, this example I think that
14:21you've given is a great example, Rob, and allow that to be expressed. And that could be in a trade
14:27relationship, it could be in a commercial or personal, etc. So I think we're at the very,
14:32very early stages of an explosion in smart contracts, actually, because of generative AI.
14:40So that's fascinating, what does that ultimately, I've been covering, you know, digital assets for
14:43about 10 years or so, the word tokenization has been in that industry for a very large part of that.
14:51And there's always been this promise towards tokenization. Given what you've been saying both
14:56about AI agents, about smart contracts, and sort of this, this growth we're seeing, what does that
15:01ultimately now mean for real world tokenization? We started with money. What's, what's next? And what
15:08does AI and these improving technologies mean for the ability to scale tokenization in financial markets?
15:15Yeah, I'll go first. And then Jeremy can go. First, I think we haven't yet started
15:25the actual activity of tokenization. And it's very interesting, because I think if you look at the
15:33headlines, relative to the actual values, there's a huge gap. So this, this hasn't yet started. I think,
15:41ironically, cash is such a good starting point. And by cash, I don't just mean transferring
15:48currencies. I also mean money market funds and a variety of other cash-like instruments.
15:55It's such a good starting point, because there are a shocking number of frictions. But I think,
16:02ultimately, what we're going to find is two things. One, in traditional capital markets use cases,
16:10there are many opportunities where you could achieve a better, faster, cheaper outcome through
16:15tokenization. That requires a network effect that is yet to come. That will be gradual at first,
16:22then very quick at some point. But we're still not yet at the point of it being very quick.
16:29And then the second concept, with regard to tokenization, is I think we're going to see
16:35how new instruments can be created that used to be much more challenging, much more paper-based.
16:43Again, going back to the smart contract, whether you look in the capital markets at a structured product,
16:50or whether you look at an over-the-counter derivative, all of those things are programmatic.
16:56The old way it used to be done was I send you paper, you program it on your system, and
17:03I program it on
17:05my system. Now we're going to be sending effectively code back and forth that we share.
17:11Yeah, I would just say in a general way, as we upgrade to these new economic operating systems,
17:20inherently, all representations of value need to be digitized. That's why I think this concept of
17:26digital assets is the right one as well. It's really making them accessible to these operating
17:31systems so that the programs that run on these operating systems and the contracts that intermediate
17:36those can interact. You get the benefit of something that's open, global, accessible,
17:42interoperable, composable, so that code can interact with it. I think on the AI layer, just as another
17:49note, one of the things that crypto has really suffered from is that the technology is very powerful,
17:58powerful, but it's hard to use. It's hard to use, and I think with generative AI, we now have this
18:08intent-based user experience. We have a voice-based user experience. We can express what we're trying
18:14to accomplish, and then all the hard stuff happens in the background. If anyone's used codex or cloud code
18:19or co-work or any of these tools, it's extraordinary because an individual can express some intent and then
18:25this thing is writing code. I actually think tokenization, smart contracts, these underlying
18:33layers, and then the ability for people to merely express what they want to accomplish,
18:39the technology will become invisible, and these intent-based user interfaces will become more
18:46prevalent. I think that's a breakthrough, and it makes the how do you make this useful or how do you
18:53make it safe? How do I worry about all the keys I have to manage? All that stuff disappears because
18:59the machine environment can do those extremely well, and so I think these intersect in some really
19:06powerful ways that, again, are force multipliers. Do we know what the user interface for that is going
19:11to look like? Is it going to be ChatGPT or Gemini, something else? I mean, my view is that
19:19more and more these intent-based user experiences will be predominant, and they're not all necessarily
19:26running through the same universal app, and so I think, you know, the ability to use a voice native
19:36app or a text-based intent-based app, that's just going to become ubiquitous, and many, many apps will
19:41just begin to surface this, and you'll have multi-surface engagements with those that are context-bound.
19:48So it's not one app. It's, I think, just generally things will move towards that, and we will use
19:55fewer hardened surfaces that we interact with. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think you're just going to
20:02talk to your computer. You're either going to talk to it in voice, or you're going to type in
20:10instructions, and you will, most people won't even know what they're using. Yeah. It'll come with the
20:17device. Yeah. Or my smart glasses, or my jewelry. Or the microphone that doesn't work. Yeah.
20:25Just, I want to pick up on something you said, Rob, which was about, you know, the tokenization journey,
20:30and how we're sort of right at the start still. And you said it's going to go slow, and then
20:35it'll
20:35increase. What currently are sort of some of the barriers or the challenges that need to be overcome
20:41for real scalable tokenization to take place? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think as a starting
20:48point, we all need to realize that these are all about the network effects. And what happens is that
20:57network effects start out slow, and then you get enough participation, and they start to accelerate
21:03very rapidly. What I would observe is at this point, if we would have had this conversation five or
21:1110 years ago, tokenization as a concept, digital assets, crypto, would have been something very much at
21:21odds with the traditional financial ecosystem. And to a large degree, when I say at odds, I don't mean that
21:30because I have great intuition. It was actually at odds. The whole concept was the old world is dead,
21:39long live the new world. And I think what's happened now is participants in the traditional capital
21:47markets and participants in the digital asset ecosystem, they realize that the real force multiplier
21:55is how do you actually leverage both together. So right now, I think you'd be hard-pressed if you
22:03polled 10 financial institutions. I'd be shocked if all 10 weren't working on some experimentation,
22:12pilot, something with regard to tokenization. A lot of it on the cash or money market side,
22:20a lot of it with regard to trying to tokenize private market funds, which are harder to access.
22:28But people are working on this, and at some point, that network effect will start to be achieved.
22:35My own opinion is we're probably quarters or a couple of years away from that really starting,
22:41but it's getting closer and closer.
22:43Jeremy, you used the term operating system earlier, which I think is a really interesting
22:48way to sort of frame it. If I sort of use an analogy in the consumer electronics world,
22:54right, the two big operating systems are Android and iOS. One of the, I guess, challenges between
23:00two operating systems, sometimes they're not interoperable. And as you think about the operating
23:05system in the world of finances where banks are building on this blockchain, like Ethereum,
23:10Ethereum, but also on something else, and other institutions building on their own blockchain.
23:15When you think about scalability around this sort of tokenization world around blockchains,
23:20does that pose a challenge, this sort of fragmentation of how things are being built?
23:25Yeah, I mean, look, I think in every platform shift that we've seen,
23:29those platform shifts have tended towards three to five major platforms, whether that's cloud platforms,
23:36or mobile platforms, or AI foundation model platforms, lots of things, good examples in history.
23:44And I think that in the economic OS space, you'll see a similar thing emerge. There is more
23:50fragmentation than that today, but I think as we go into mainstream scaling, you'll see more of that.
23:55I think the important thing though, is that all of this technology is built on the premise of openness and
24:02interoperability. Literally, it's all open source technology. The vast majority of these networks
24:09are being built on computer programming language and virtual machine architectures that are compatible.
24:14So if you write code for one, you could more or less reuse that code on another. And then critically,
24:21and this is key from a financial perspective, is the kind of infrastructure that provides
24:26interoperability between these platforms and networks. And that's been a place where Circle
24:32has invested massively. We now currently run the most widely adopted interoperability infrastructure
24:38for working, moving assets between blockchains than anything else in the world. And we're opening
24:44that up so that if I'm issuing an asset, like say, a BlackRock tokenized iShare product, theoretically,
24:50or whatever it is, some asset. And I want that to be not just on Arc, but I want it
24:57on Canton,
24:59and I want it on Ethereum, and I want it on Solana, etc. That we can create a way for
25:03people to be able
25:04to move those easily and have the logic and the code around it also be compatible across these. So
25:10it's kind of the write once, run anywhere kind of publishing model that we've seen in other platforms,
25:18but seeing that brought to the financial system as well.
25:21What, and the question for both of you, what do you think the sort of landscape of digital money
25:26looks like in the future? Right now, you know, stable coins are such a fascinating product. They
25:30digitize the dollar or the euro or currency. You've then got your traditional cryptos in the sense of
25:37Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many of the thousands of us that are out there. You've also got sort of the
25:45continued talk around central bank digital currencies. Is there a world in which all of these things
25:53are part of a future financial system? Yes.
26:01I believe that one of the things we love, this goes back to what I said earlier,
26:08we love the answers to be binary, like yes or no. There's utility among everything you described.
26:16Do I think there will be a VivaTech token? That I'm less sure about. But at the same time,
26:23the concept of the world is a big place. If you go to India, where I know Prime Minister Modi
26:32will be
26:32here tomorrow, India, in terms of how payments work, how money works, the ability to access information,
26:43your phone effectively being your identity card, it's light years ahead of going to the United States.
26:54So when you really look at the world and how the world has developed per country,
27:00there will be very different use cases and value propositions for each component you described.
27:06I do think there's a long tail of things that some of us may have heard of, but many of
27:14us hasn't.
27:15I think that will likely compress. But I think for the primary concepts, there are great use cases,
27:23depending on where you are in the world. And Jeremy, you'll be?
27:27Yeah, I mean, I largely agree. I think there are going to be scaled forms of money that have
27:37very significant network effects and that many software programs and people and businesses depend
27:44upon. But I think region by region, large commercial entity by large commercial entity,
27:51there are going to be many networks, there'll be many representations of money, there's going to be
27:55many non-sovereign forms of money. Bitcoin is not the only non-sovereign form of money. So I think we're
28:02still in the early days of that. But I think there are going to be forms of money that have
28:12internet
28:12scale and achieve that scale. But it's going to be heterogeneous, I have no doubt.
28:19We've got about a minute left. So just as we close out crystal ball time, if we're sat here in
28:23a year,
28:24all three of us again, what do you think we're going to be talking about?
28:29I think by far, we're going to be talking about AI and technology being the same thing,
28:38because there won't be technology without AI, and there won't be AI without technology.
28:42And I think even a question like the interoperability question, it has never been cheaper in human
28:51history to write a line of code than today. In a year, it'll be a fraction of the cost that
28:58it is
28:59today. We are going to see an explosion in the amount of technology, the amount of software,
29:06the amount of code in the world. Jeremy? Yeah, very aligned. I think a lot about this concept of
29:16the agentic economy, and the changes in what it is to be a corporation, to create value,
29:25the decomposition of work and labor, and how that's transforming every organization, the volume of
29:31output that comes from that. So I think we're going to be moving from an experimental conceptual phase
29:38to a very accelerative phase, and we'll be seeing that and talking about that in a very substantial
29:44way in a year. Jeremy, Rob, thank you for your sharp and fascinating insights into the topic. Really
29:50appreciate it. Round of applause for our wonderful panel here. Thank you.
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