ETHTaipei 2026 concluded on Sept. 13-14 at POPOP Taipei in Nangang, with a two-day agenda focused on Ethereum research, development, and financial use cases. Speakers included Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Taiwan Mobile President and AppWorks chairman and partner Lin Chih-chen, while Financial Supervisory-related industry body representative Huang Hsi-ho, secretary-general of the National Federation of Financial Industries, also delivered remarks at the event.
The conference split its program across two tracks by day. Cryptonative Day on Sept. 13 centered on protocol research, privacy, security, and onchain efficiency. Institution Day on Sept. 14 brought in banks, financial institutions, and companies to discuss how digital assets could be used in financial markets.
Vitalik Buterin framed blockchain around censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security
In the opening talk of Cryptonative Day, Buterin used the acronym CROPS to describe the goals blockchain systems should serve: censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.
His point was straightforward. Blockchain is a tool for achieving those outcomes, not the starting point by itself. Developers, he said, should first identify the problem they are trying to solve and then decide which parts of a system actually need blockchain components.
Buterin also turned to AI. He discussed risks tied to proprietary models, data surveillance, and de-anonymization, then used privacy-preserving AI queries and verifiable public-safety cameras as examples of how local or open-source AI, anonymous networks, zero-knowledge proofs, and trusted hardware can be combined. In those designs, blockchain would handle payments, trusted commitments, and public verification, while other functions stay offchain.
Draft EIP-8288 and Polymarket’s protocol redesign both targeted efficiency
In another technical session, Buterin introduced EIP-8288, a proposal that remains in draft form. The idea is to aggregate signatures and proofs in the mempool before block inclusion, so each block would only need to carry one aggregated STARK instead of repeatedly transmitting and recording large proofs one by one.
The design is aimed at lowering verification costs for signatures and proofs, which could make privacy tools and post-quantum security schemes easier to adopt. Buterin noted that EIP-8288 is still a draft and that neither the final specification nor the adoption timeline has been settled.
Aditya, a senior protocol engineer at Polymarket, described a different but related challenge: the technical demands created by roughly 30,000 markets per day on the platform and the need to reduce onchain reads and writes.
He said the new protocol version uses a modular structure and follows a derive, don’t store principle. Market information is encoded into a 256-bit position ID, alongside lazy initialization and a replaceable oracle design. According to Aditya, the platform at peak periods once used about 70% of Polygon block space. Internal estimates from the team suggest V2 could bring that figure down to about 30%.
Institution Day focused on digital assets and traditional finance
The Institution Day program covered digital assets, stablecoins, custody, real-world assets, and compliance.
In his keynote, Lin Chih-chen said the addressable market remains limited if blockchain is used only for trading natively crypto-based assets. If stocks, bonds, and real estate are to run on onchain systems, he said, the industry will need to work with financial institutions, regulators, and existing market participants.
Lin used the development of the internet as a comparison and argued that institutional participation does not necessarily change the open nature of a system. He likened regulation to a protocol for the real world: blockchain protocols define how value and data are exchanged, while regulation provides a common rule set for commercial society. In his view, compliance, governance, and user protection are issues the crypto industry must confront as it tries to widen adoption.
Lin Chih-chen laid out a three-stage Crypto Island roadmap for Taiwan
Lin proposed three stages for building what he called Crypto Island: corporate digital asset reserves, DeFi development, and moving financial infrastructure onchain.
He said Taiwan’s position in foreign trade, supply chains, and the technology sector, along with its existing base of crypto users and compliant operators, could support applications such as cross-border transfers, supply-chain finance, asset tokenization, and payments handled by AI agents.
Under his Finance 2.0 concept, the internet handles information exchange, blockchain handles value exchange, and AI handles automation. Together, those systems would support financial services. Lin said he hopes that by 2030 Taiwan will be not only a technology manufacturing center, but also an important node in digital finance.
A two-day agenda that paired research with financial applications
Across both days, ETHTaipei 2026 placed research topics such as openness, privacy, security, and onchain efficiency alongside discussions involving banks, regulation, assets, and Taiwan’s broader industrial base. The setup created a venue for researchers, developers, community members, financial institutions, and companies to meet around both protocol design and market-facing applications.