Solana announces Breakpoint 2026 speaker lineup featuring institutional heavyweights

Solana’s annual Breakpoint conference is crossing the Atlantic for the first time, and it’s bringing some serious institutional firepower with it. The Solana Foundation revealed its speaker lineup for Breakpoint 2026 on August 27, confirming that the event will run November 15-17 at Olympia London with a theme built around what the organization is calling the “Token Supercycle.”

The conference expects to draw more than 8,000 attendees from over 100 countries, a scale that would make it one of the larger crypto-focused gatherings of the year.

The lineup bridges Wall Street and Web3

Confirmed keynote speakers include Anthony Soohoo, CEO of MoneyGram, and Balaji Srinivasan, the former Coinbase CTO and founder of The Network State. Tad Smith, CEO of Candy Digital, rounds out the marquee names.

The programming is split into two thematic days. Day 1 zeroes in on the present state of on-chain financial infrastructure, covering stablecoins, payments, and the plumbing that actually moves money through blockchain rails today. Day 2 pivots to what’s next: AI-driven markets, programmable capital, and the technologies that could reshape how assets are created, traded, and settled over the next decade.

Why London, and why now

Solana’s ecosystem has been attracting capital deployment from firms like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, according to the research. Moving the event to London, the world’s largest foreign exchange trading hub, lowers the friction for the exact audience Solana wants in the room.

The ‘token supercycle’ thesis

Payments infrastructure is a pillar of Day 1’s programming, and MoneyGram CEO Anthony Soohoo’s keynote slot underscores the point. Remittance corridors, particularly in emerging markets, represent one of the clearest product-market fits for blockchain-based payments, offering lower fees, faster settlement, and rails that don’t require correspondent banking relationships that can add days and costs to simple transfers.

Day 2’s focus on AI-driven markets and programmable capital reflects the intersection of machine learning and on-chain finance, producing automated market-making strategies, transparent on-chain risk assessment models, and capital allocation systems that execute complex strategies without human intervention.