Lawrence Ley of George Brown College

Agentic AI represents a fundamental shift from passive language models to autonomous systems that can plan, reason, and take multi-step actions to achieve goals. When combined with blockchain technology, these agents gain the ability to transact value, log decisions immutably, and operate within trustless, decentralized frameworks. This convergence however, comes with challenges around accountability, smart contract vulnerabilities, AI hallucination in high-stakes environments, and a regulatory landscape that hasn't kept pace with the technology. The core takeaway is that agentic AI and blockchain aren't merely two parallel tech trends but are complementary building blocks of a trustless, autonomous economy that could fundamentally redefine how we transact, make decisions, and even structure organizations.

Biography:

Lawrence has a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto with over 20 years of IT industry experience in the telecommunications, banking, retail and media industries. He is a professor in the Blockchain Development Program, George Brown College in Toronto and the author of the book, Ultimate Cardano Smart Contracts. He consults and teaches courses on a variety of blockchain technologies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Hyperledger Fabric and many more.

Ken Timsit of Agentini

This year, three mutually reinforcing trends will help to make agentic commerce and payments a reality. First, the adoption of tools like Claude Cowork, Perplexity Computer, and OpenClaw by small and mid-sized companies to streamline their operations. Second, continued investments by payment actors like Mastercard, Stripe, and Circle in the creation of interoperable, blockchain-based transaction ecosystems. Last but not least, the emergence of standards such as x402, AP2, and ACP that facilitate communication between agents. In this talk, Ken will take stock of these trends and propose 5 predictions for how the market will shape up over the next 12 months.

Biography:

Ken Timsit is CEO of Agentini, helping mid-sized companies to make their teams smarter and faster with agentic workflows. He was previously the global head of Cronos, the Web3/DeFi venture studio associated with the Crypto.com ecosystem, and Chief Revenue Officer at Consensys, the blockchain technology company behind market-leading products MetaMask and Infura.

Manuel Badel of Badel Media

A workshop that sparks reflection and agile application pathways for media asset traceability and monetization

Fully dedicated to the integration of Blockchain and AI, the session will explore how these technologies can ensure content traceability and authenticity, unlock new funding opportunities for projects, and provide innovative models for intellectual property (IP) management and monetization. A deep dive designed to deliver practical tools and strategic insights for professionals in the audiovisual and creative industries.

Biography:

A pioneer in blockchain technology in the creative sectors since 2017, Manuel Badel launched the first experiments in Canada with broadcaster Groupe Média TFO, then organized the first conference on the subject at a major festival (EFM-Berlinale, 2018) with Telefilm Canada. His industry study, published by Telefilm and the Canada Media Fund, is among the leading references in the field. A specialist in media project financing, he combines consulting and research with a commitment to the Canadian Red Cross as a foundation and grant advisor. This experience enriches his vision and anchors his work on AI and blockchain in an approach to creative asset valuation that fully integrates issues of social impact and economic development.

Address:Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Srisht Fateh Singh of University of Toronto

This work presents a novel option-theoretic framework for modeling automated market maker (AMM) liquidity positions. We show that a constant-function AMM position can be replicated by a portfolio of perpetual American continuous-installment (CI) options, and prove that Loss-Versus-Rebalancing (LVR), the primary adverse-selection cost facing liquidity providers, is analytically equivalent to the funding fees of the at-the-money CI option in this replicating portfolio. We further derive liquidity profiles and price boundaries that yield approximately constant, price-independent LVR over arbitrarily long forward windows, and discuss practical calibration from implied volatility term structures. The results give liquidity providers a rigorous, actionable framework for estimating future adverse-selection costs and optimizing position parameters.

(https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02971)

Biography:

Srisht Fateh Singh received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, in 2021, and the M.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, in 2023, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Veneris. His research interests include decentralized finance, automated market makers, perpetual derivatives markets, and mechanism design for blockchain-based financial protocols.

Revanth Reddy Airre of HippocraticAI

As AI agents evolve from passive assistants into autonomous economic actors, they need the ability to transact, but giving an LLM a wallet creates entirely new attack surfaces. This talk presents a formal architecture for agent-to-agent payments using stablecoins, drawing from his recent work that addresses the critical question: how can agentic payments be simultaneously secure, economically rational, and regulation-compliant? He’ll walk through a five-layer design that separates an agent's reasoning from its spending authority, examine real-world security data showing that 26% of agent skills contain vulnerabilities, and explore emerging protocols like x402 that enable "payments over HTTP" for machine commerce. Attendees will leave with a concrete mental model for how stablecoins can serve as the monetary layer for autonomous AI systems, and what can go wrong if we get the architecture wrong.

Biography:

Revanth is a Staff Engineer at the Silicon Valley AI startup HippocraticAI, a thought leader, and a technology expert with a strong commitment to supporting the broader tech community. He holds a Master's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his expertise spans distributed systems, blockchain, AI inference infrastructure, and AI agents, including the intersection of stablecoins and autonomous agent payment infrastructure — the subject of this talk
His career across Silicon Valley startups in both blockchain and AI gives him a unique vantage point on how these two domains are converging. Prior to HippocraticAI, he worked at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, designing   large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems serving 70M+ users, and contributed to blockchain and AI startups.    
As Chair of the IEEE Silicon Valley Blockchain Chapter and Global Student Blockchain Club Coordinator, Revanth leads community initiatives at the intersection of blockchain, AI, and cloud computing. He served on the Program Committee for the International Conference on Blockchain Research and Applications and coordinates global university blockchain clubs for the IEEE Blockchain Technical Community. He also actively supports the tech ecosystem by reviewing research work, serving as an expert member of technology judging panels, mentoring early-career technologists, and promoting innovation.

Email:

Address:Sunnyvale, California, United States

Ngozi Nora Agwu

This presentation examines the governance architecture shaping the scalability of blockchain-enabled infrastructure in mature regulatory environments. While tokenization technologies have advanced significantly, critical infrastructure sectors remain governed by layered legal and institutional frameworks not designed for digital fractional ownership. Drawing on Institutional Theory and comparative policy analysis, the talk argues that regulatory consistency, cross-agency coordination, and securities alignment are decisive conditions for sustainable integration. It introduces a regulatory readiness framework to assess how jurisdictions can align digital asset innovation with institutional stability, investor protection, and inclusive capital participation.

Biography:

Ngozi Nora Agwu works at the intersection of digital finance, infrastructure policy, and renewable energy systems. She holds an MBA in Financial Management Analytics and researches how regulatory frameworks influence the practical scalability of blockchain-enabled infrastructure. Using institutional theory and comparative policy analysis, her work assesses the conditions necessary to incorporate tokenized assets into established energy and financial markets. She is especially interested in developing policy frameworks that enable digital innovation to enhance investor protection, increase participation, and promote sustainable infrastructure growth.

Address:Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Douglas Heintzman of Blockchain Research Institute (BRI)

Digital Trust Infrastructure, or DTI, is the foundational layer of the digital economy. Just as roads and power grids enabled the industrial era, digital infrastructure will determine productivity, sovereignty, and innovation in the twenty first century.

Today, identity is fragmented, data is siloed, and trust relies on centralized intermediaries. This limits collaboration and concentrates power. If we want a resilient and citizen centric digital economy, we need a new foundation.

DTI rests on five pillars: personal digital identity that is portable and user controlled, trusted credentials for organizations and machines, reliable and interoperable data, fast and secure digital payments, and sovereign AI aligned with national laws and values.

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can strengthen transparency, auditability, and collaboration across complex ecosystems.

At its core, DTI is about restoring trust at scale. If the industrial era was built on steel rails, the digital era will be built on digital rails. The question is whether we will design and govern them deliberately, or inherit them by default.

Biography:

Douglas Heintzman is the Chief Catalyst at the Blockchain Research Institute (BRI), where he collaborates with members around the world to guide them on their Web3 transformation journeys. Throughout his career, he has focused on disruptive technologies and their influence on business strategy, organizational design, and enterprise innovation. His leadership experience spans roles as an entrepreneur, founder, chief executive officer, chief operating officer, strategy executive, and management consultant.

Email:

Address:Toronto, Ontario, Canada