Field Notes: TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026

We spent two days at our booth at TOKEN2049 Singapore in Marina Bay Sands, and the rest of the week moving between side events. This time Orochi Network came as a Silver sponsor with its own booth, and we came away with many new updates and a clearer picture of where the industry is going.

Four topics kept coming up in Singapore through the whole week: asset tokenization, stablecoins, neobanks, and privacy. Below are the details of our week, what our founder Chiro shared at the Privacy Summit, and the topics people cared about most.

Privacy was the thread through almost every conversation at our booth. Institutions now treat it as a real requirement: their data is sensitive, but partners, auditors, and regulators still need to check it. Many asked how verifiable data applies to their own industry, with asset tokenization coming up the most. Both companies and individual users also asked about zkKYC, and how to show that a person passed a check without handing their documents to one more database, a question that feels urgent with identity data leaks still in the news.

Conversations at the Orochi Network booth at TOKEN2049 Singapore.

Our founder Chiro spoke at the Privacy Summit hosted by StarkWare. The summit brought privacy and compliance into the same room for a practical conversation, and that was the spirit of the session too.

We talked about practical privacy: private payments, private DeFi, shielded assets, and real user applications. We also looked at privacy protocols in production, what is live, what is hard, and what still needs to be built, and at what the next generation of privacy builders should focus on.

The room was a good mix of privacy protocol teams, cryptographic researchers, application builders, wallet teams, institutions, policy thinkers, and people who care about making private crypto systems usable.

Our founder Chiro on stage at the Privacy Summit.

Across the main stage and the side events, these topics came up again and again.

As the industry matures, speculative use cases are being filtered out, and the focus is moving to what blockchain can change at its base. For us, the most exciting opportunity is rebuilding capital markets on-chain: a financial system that is more programmable, more efficient, and better connected.

In the age of AI, privacy and security matter more than ever. As AI agents become able to manage assets and execute transactions, blockchain can provide the rails for programmable payments and automated settlement. The potential is exciting, but security, compliance, privacy, and verifiable data have to be in place before this works at scale.

Quantum and privacy became a focal point as the community discussed the quantum threat to blockchain security and privacy. NEAR stood out for already running post-quantum ML-DSA signatures on mainnet, which lets users upgrade their account keys without moving assets. StarkWare and STARK technology were mentioned often for delivering scalability with hash-based proofs that are considered quantum-resistant and can also support privacy. Overall, the industry is shifting from theoretical concerns to practical talks about migration, combining ZK privacy with post-quantum security to build a more resilient on-chain ecosystem.

Stablecoins are bridging traditional finance and blockchain, with faster settlement, more efficient liquidity management, and lower cross-border payment costs. Neobanks were often part of the same discussion, as one of the most direct ways to bring stablecoin payments to everyday users. Combined with AI-driven automation, stablecoins could change how money moves around the world and how businesses manage capital.

More institutions are exploring asset tokenization, but bringing an asset on-chain does not create liquidity by itself. The bigger opportunity is the infrastructure around it: secondary-market trading, collateral management, and efficient settlement. That is what improves capital efficiency and opens access to more investment opportunities. Interoperability, liquidity, and risk management are still the hard parts.

A main stage panel on how to make tokenized assets productive.

Our biggest takeaway is that we are moving toward a more programmable financial system, where stablecoins move value, asset tokenization brings assets on-chain, DeFi adds new financial functions, prediction markets give new information signals, and AI could make all of these systems more intelligent and automated.

The challenge is connecting all of it through infrastructure that is privacy-preserving, secure, interoperable, and ready for compliance.

Thank you to everyone who came to our booth, played the game, and stayed to talk. See you at the next one.