Buidl Europe 2026: The State of Decentralization

**Matthew Arrow** (0:00)
In this world of evolving cipher punks to institutions in KYC and AML, it's likely inevitable if we want more mainstream adoption of this space, but then to maintain that freedom to say, okay, well, it's not working for me, I'm gonna go here.

**Sebastian Couture** (0:15)
When we get privacy on Blockchains, institutions and companies and sort of corporate world get some benefit from that, but also individuals do, because let's hope that individuals also get the benefit from it, because we may also end up in a sort of two-tiered world where the powerful get their privacy, but the weak do not, and so that would not be a great outcome. This is a spectrum. All of us care about privacy in some way, shape or form, but I still use iMessage, and I still use WhatsApp, and I still do Twitter DMs and stuff.

**Aurora Orellana** (0:41)
I think if you're looking more at the institutional side regarding privacy, they want the privacy on their clients, the privacy on the transactions, while still being able to be auditable to a degree.

**Richard Muirhead** (0:54)
People are, slash should only be comfortable really sharing that information if they have privacy.

**Sebastian Couture** (1:04)
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. We're here today at Buidl Europe. Hi guys. Thanks for joining me today. So we'll start with a brief round of introductions for this panel on DeFi and institutions. What happens to cypherpunk values when institutions start buying our bags? Basically, the idea here is crypto at a sort of an existential point where institutional adoption of crypto leads a lot of the ethos and values and principles that have driven all this innovation for the last 15 years. Does it throw a lot of those principles out the window? Yeah, but we'll start with brief introductions to my...

**Matthew Arrow** (1:51)
Sure, right.

**Sebastian Couture** (1:52)
Hey guys, my name is Ben Lakoff. I'm actually based here in Lisbon and I run Bankless Ventures, which is our early stage venture fund in the crypto ecosystem.

**Matthew Arrow** (2:01)
I'm Matthew Arrow. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Dark Forest. We advise on market microstructures and token liquidity to foundations and protocols within the crypto ecosystem.

**Aurora Orellana** (2:14)
Hi everyone, I'm Aurora Orellana. I work for Managing Director at G20 Strategies. We support a lot of blockchain protocols with market making. We do advisory and we support for a lot of OTC services and treasury management as well as asset management. Thank you.

**Richard Muirhead** (2:31)
Hi everyone. I'm Richard Muirhead. I'm a managing partner of Fabric Ventures and we have been kicking around in the space since about 2012, back a couple of hundred different projects and seen a few crypto ways and seen a few ways over the last set of decades. I also have one other kind of small hat, which is I'm on the board of Sovereign SBRN, which is spun out of the kind of near ecosystem. It's where I try to keep my sword sharp from an operational perspective because I could have from whence I came.

**Sebastian Couture** (3:03)
This episode has brought you my Gnosis, building the open Internet one block at a time. Gnosis was founded in 2015 and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user owned finance. Gnosis is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like Safe and Cowswap. At the center is Gnosis Chain. It's a low fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Gnosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Gnosis DAO, a community run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring gnosis.io. Before we start this conversation, I think one interesting question to perhaps get into is like what are the values that we will actually want to defend as an industry, as people have been building in the space for a long time, who came into the industry with aspirations of a world where interactions would be mediated by systems, where trust was minimized, where people had financial freedom, where perhaps even things like regulation, sanctions could be skirted. What are the values that we actually want to defend and want to carry on into the next 10 to 15 years of crypto adoption as institutions becoming increasingly involved in the space?