Inside Ibiza Tech Forum 2026: Stablecoins, RWA and the State of Post-MiCA European Crypto

The fourth edition of Ibiza Tech Forum unfolded between May 19 and May 22 across the south of the island, splitting its programme between the Caló de s’Oli Auditorium, Romeos Hotel, Hotel Bonito Ibiza, Es Jardins de Fruitera and Cova Santa.

Across four days, the forum stitched six tracks together — AI, Bank & Fintech, Smart Islands & Smart Mobility, Health Tech, Web3 & Blockchain, and SportTech — but for the digital assets industry, the gravity of the event sat squarely on Thursday, May 21.

That was the day BeInCrypto stepped on the main stage.

Ibiza Tech Forum: Two panels, one through-line

BeInCrypto Poland Editor-in-Chief Jakub Dziadkowiec hosted two of the day’s headline sessions, both at the Caló de s’Oli Auditorium.

The first, “On-Chain and Unfiltered,” was billed as a Stelar Fireside Chat and ended up being precisely that: a candid, sometimes blunt exchange with Evan Luthra (General Partner at KOL Capital) and Yana Makhnyk (CBDO at Generis) about influence, wealth, community and what Web3 actually got right. The conversation refused to flatter the room. It pushed against a comfortable narrative of the industry as a meritocracy and instead asked who actually moves capital, who builds influence, and what survives once the noise drops out.

The second was a Digital Assets roundtable — “Redefining Financial Infrastructure: Stablecoins, RWA and the Next Global Markets” — and it brought to the table the people building the rails: Sam Buxton (Founder & Chairman, Damex), Víctor Sáez (Director, Expansion & Strategic Partnerships, Kraken), Nelson Enrique Moran (Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Trezora), María Sánchez (Investor Relations Specialist, Reental), Erick Ortiz (Blockchain Advisor, BBVA), and Christopher Siedentopf (Founder of CRS Advisory & Head of Sales at Qapture Investments).

The discussion moved past the usual stablecoin talking points and into what the infrastructure actually has to deliver — settlement guarantees, regulatory alignment, real-world asset onboarding — before the next wave of capital trusts the plumbing.

What Thursday told us about European crypto in 2026

Thursday’s programme read like an inventory of where the European crypto industry is post-MiCA. The earlier roundtable on the main stage — pointedly titled “Lost at sea no more: How Europe’s Crypto Industry Survived to See MiCA” — gathered MoonPay, Bit2me, Criptan, Bitvavo and Mandioca alongside legal counsel from Asensi Abogados. The shared subtext, audible across the day, was that European operators have stopped treating regulation as an existential threat and started treating it as a moat.

That shift showed up in adjacent sessions too. “The New Financial Backbone,” the exchanges-led panel that followed BeInCrypto’s roundtable, brought together Bitget, Bybit EU, Solana Foundation, TradingView and FX Street — the kind of lineup that would have read as aspirational two years ago and now reads as the working order. And Dynex CEO Daniela Herrmann’s quantum-computing keynote earlier in the morning underlined that the industry’s frontier is no longer “will crypto survive?” but “what stack comes next?”

Ibiza Tech Forum 2026: A different kind of conference floor

The substance of the panels was only half of what made ITF 2026 work. The island shaped the rest.

Day one’s opening at Romeos Hotel doubled as the semi-final of The Next Unicorn startup contest, and set a register the rest of the event maintained: structured by day, social by evening. Day two — anchored by Spanish-language panels on smart mobility, AI in business, predictive cities and personal branding for founders — gave way to a SportTech afternoon, a TradingView trading competition at Hotel Bonito Ibiza, and a rooftop dinner on the same property.

Day three’s networking lunch at Es Jardins de Fruitera and the Female Founders & Investors session bridged the formal programme into the closing dinner at Cova Santa, a venue whose acoustics and topography do a lot of the work that name-brand venues elsewhere have to manufacture.

The fourth day was reserved for the smallest, most senior group: a boat trip to Formentera, lunch on board, and a swim in water clear enough to make the previous 72 hours feel like a different event entirely. That contrast is the design of ITF — it gives senior operators a reason to stay through Friday, and it gives the conversations begun on stage a frame to continue in.

What BeInCrypto walked away with

Beyond the two stage appearances, BeInCrypto conducted roughly nine on-the-ground interviews and built out more than thirty C-level relationships across exchanges, infrastructure providers, asset managers and adjacent verticals — fintech, sport, longevity, AI:

• Teresa Castagnino — CEO and co-Founder at Like Group Management; Head Forbes of Mexican Caribbean
• Yossi Goldsmith and Cristo Millar — IKAL
• Iñaki Zubeldia — CEO and co-Founder at Yoseyomo and Inheritans, and Mayte Clara — Investor & Strategic Partner at Yoseyomo
• Oleg Morgunov — Head of Growth & Partnerships, Europe & LATAM, TradingView
• Jordi Urbea — CEO at Ogilvy Spain
• Javier Pastor — Head of OTC at Bit2me
• Georg Harer — Co-CEO at Bybit EU
• Daniela Herrmann — CEO and co-Founder at Dynex
• María Sánchez — Wealth Manager at Reental

Those conversations will surface in BeInCrypto coverage over the coming weeks, and several of them tracked directly back to the questions raised on Thursday’s main stage: what the post-MiCA European stack actually looks like in practice, where stablecoin and RWA infrastructure goes next, and which institutional partners are ready to operate on-chain in 2026 rather than in slide decks.

The verdict from BeInCrypto’s seat is straightforward. Ibiza Tech Forum 2026 was small enough that you could speak to whoever you wanted to speak to, serious enough that the conversations were worth having, and Mediterranean enough that the people you most wanted to follow up with were still on the island three days later. That combination is rarer than the event circuit makes it look.

For the digital assets industry, the question after MiCA is no longer whether to show up in Europe. It’s where in Europe to show up. Ibiza, on this evidence, just made its case.

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