Three days in Sofia. Two distinct audiences. One shared question: how does blockchain actually get deployed at scale, inside regulated finance, in an environment where MiCA is live and institutions are no longer waiting on the sidelines? Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026, running 23 to 25 September at Sofia Tech Park, is the event attempting to answer it.
Finonity is a media partner of Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026.
The format is deliberately split across two events sharing a venue and a week but aimed at different conversations. ETHSofia is the technical conference: engineers, protocol architects, and founders working on scalable and production-ready blockchain infrastructure. The Future Finance Forum, known as F3, is the institutional counterpart: banks, asset managers, regulators, fintechs, and capital allocators working through how compliant finance actually moves onchain. The two events are separately ticketed but co-located, which means a bank exploring tokenization and a protocol team building the rails for it end up in the same building for the same week.
That combination is not accidental. The organising team behind Blockchain Week Bulgaria has structured the programme specifically to avoid the mutual incomprehension that tends to separate builder conferences from institutional forums. The thesis is that 2026 is the year the two conversations need to happen in the same room.
Why Sofia and Why Now
Bulgaria’s position in the European Union matters more than it might appear at first glance for a blockchain event. The country has been one of the more active jurisdictions in the EU when it comes to early MiCA implementation, and the Bulgarian Financial Supervision Commission has taken a publicly supportive stance on the sector. Vasil Golemanski, Chair of the FSC, gave the opening keynote at ETHSofia 2025, stating that “crypto assets are the new frontier — a breakthrough financial instrument backed by technologies that drive innovation and security in markets.” That level of regulatory visibility at a conference is not common in Europe and reflects a genuine policy orientation rather than ceremonial participation.
Sofia also has practical advantages for organisations considering EU licensing under MiCA. The city combines relatively lower operational costs than Western European capitals with a substantial software engineering talent pool, estimated at over 200,000 qualified engineers, and a tax environment that has historically been favourable for technology businesses. For fintechs and digital asset firms evaluating where to establish an EU entity for MiCA CASP authorisation, Sofia is a credible option, and F3 is structured in part to facilitate that conversation with the relevant local regulatory and legal stakeholders in attendance.
MiCA itself is the backdrop against which the entire programme is framed. The regulation is now fully in force across the EU, and the era of watching and waiting for regulatory clarity is over. The question at F3 is not whether to engage with the framework but how to build on top of it. Bitcoin’s institutional adoption trajectory and Ethereum’s position as the primary settlement layer for much of the tokenization activity underway globally give the programme a live market context that conference organisers from two years ago would not have had access to.
ETHSofia: The Technical Day
ETHSofia has run twice before, in 2024 and 2025, and has established itself as the primary Ethereum-focused technical conference in the Balkan region. The 2026 edition maintains that positioning as the builder event of Blockchain Week Bulgaria: the programme centres on scalability, security, automation, and the practical challenges of deploying production-grade blockchain systems.
The event draws engineers and founders from across the European Web3 ecosystem and has historically featured speaker representation from major protocol teams alongside local and regional builders. ETHSofia is not a summit where institutional speakers deliver strategy presentations about digital assets as an asset class. It is a technical conference where the people writing the code talk about the problems they are actually solving. For developers in the region looking to connect with the broader Ethereum ecosystem without travelling to a major Western European city, it occupies a specific and useful gap in the conference calendar.
Recap materials from the 2024 and 2025 editions are available on the official site for context on programme depth and speaker profile. Side events and community-led sessions can be submitted for inclusion in the official programme calendar through the Blockchain Week Bulgaria Luma page, with all submissions reviewed by the organising team before listing.
F3: The Institutional Forum
The Future Finance Forum is the newer of the two events and is explicitly positioned as an institutional forum rather than a general-audience conference. The format reflects that: a single editorial track with no parallel sessions and no vendor pitch slots, drawing a curated audience of institutional finance leaders, regulators, and capital allocators. The stated goal is to put the capital, compliance, and policy sides of the onchain finance conversation in the same room without the noise that surrounds larger events.
The confirmed speaker list for F3 2026 already reflects genuine institutional depth. Sai Agnikhotram, Vice President of Bank-to-Bank Banking at Sygnum Bank — the Swiss digital asset bank and one of the most significant licensed institutions in the space — joins to speak on bank-to-bank enablement for regulated crypto access. Martin Leinweber, Head of Digital Asset Research and Strategy at MarketVector Indexes, brings close to two decades of portfolio management experience across equities, fixed income, and alternatives to a programme focused on how asset managers build digital asset exposure for institutional clients.
Tamara Ferreira Schmidt, Executive Director of the Digital Euro Association, speaks on CBDCs and digital finance from a policy and advocacy perspective. Ivar Wiersma, Head of EMEA at LayerZero Labs and the person who founded and built ING’s Wholesale Banking innovation and blockchain team, represents the intersection of traditional finance and interoperability infrastructure. Dr. Valentin Marinov, Managing Director and Head of G10 FX Research at Crédit Agricole CIB, brings a capital markets perspective from one of Europe’s largest banking groups. Damyan Leshev, a partner at Eversheds Sutherland heading the firm’s crypto practice in Bulgaria and one of the country’s most recognised practitioners in digital assets law, is positioned to address the MiCA implementation and licensing questions that European and international firms are actively navigating.
Ivan Takev, Head of Capital Markets and Investments at Alaric Securities and a former CEO of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange, connects the local institutional finance infrastructure to the digital asset discussion. Diana Ilieva, a tokenomics consultant at FinDaS with a background in both software development and finance, speaks to the structural mechanics of real-world asset tokenization. Milan de Reede, co-founder of NanoGPT and former crypto lead at the Dutch Central Bank, covers the AI-autonomous finance track. Alexander Sverdlov, founder of Atlant Security and a UN Cybersecurity Panelist, addresses the security architecture questions that become critical when financial infrastructure moves onchain.
Vyara Savova, Senior Policy Lead at the European Ethereum Institute and a PhD candidate researching legal automation through smart contracts, rounds out the speaker list with the regulatory and policy framing for open, permissionless blockchain applications in the EU context. Sam Mudie, Founder and CEO of Savea, speaks on tokenizing real-world assets in a product context, with Savea currently building institutional onchain exposure to tangible assets including fine wine.
The Programme Themes in Context
The five editorial tracks at F3 reflect where the institutional onchain finance conversation actually is in mid-2026. MiCA and regulatory frameworks covers live implementation, early licensing cycles, and the emerging supervisory standards that institutions operating in EU digital asset markets now need to navigate in practice rather than in anticipation. Tokenization and real-world assets addresses the issuance, settlement, and distribution of traditional assets onchain, a market that has grown more than 2,400 percent since 2024 according to the organising team’s own figures, driven by government bond issuances, private credit programmes, and commodity-linked products from institutions including BlackRock and Franklin Templeton.
Stablecoins and payments infrastructure is the track covering the settlement rail question: how stablecoin infrastructure, tokenized deposits, and onchain payment systems integrate with existing banking systems and cross-border payment infrastructure. With stablecoins having surpassed $300 billion in circulation and processed over $33 trillion in annual transaction volume, the conversations here are operational rather than speculative. Institutional deployment and custody covers the risk and compliance architecture that banks and asset managers need to build when they move beyond proof-of-concept into production. Onchain AI and autonomous finance addresses the emerging question of what happens when agentic AI systems begin executing financial operations in regulated markets, reshaping liquidity and execution in ways that supervisory frameworks are only beginning to address.
The Blockchain Week Bulgaria programme also runs a side events and community calendar that is open to independently organised events connecting to the core themes. Teams interested in running a workshop, meetup, or session during the week can submit through the official Luma page.
Practical Details
Blockchain Week Bulgaria 2026 runs from 23 to 25 September at the Innovation Forum John Atanasoff at Sofia Tech Park, located at 111 Tsarigradsko Shosse Blvd, 1784 Sofia, Bulgaria. The full day-by-day programme schedule will be confirmed by the organising team in the coming months. Early bird tickets are available through the official site.
Platinum sponsorship is provided by UEB3. Silver partners include Pashov Audit Group. Bronze partners include Bitomat and Unramp. The event’s hosting and infrastructure provider is BRAIN++, the Bulgarian AI Factory and part of the EuroHPC network of AI factories.
Applications to speak at F3 are open through the official application form on the Blockchain Week Bulgaria website. Partnership and sponsorship enquiries are handled through the same platform. The organising team can also be reached directly at [email protected].
Full event information, ticket options, and the official programme calendar are available at blockchainweek.bg. The Future Finance Forum page is at blockchainweek.bg/f3. The ETHSofia conference page is at ethsofia.com.
