From October 1–2, 2025, TOKEN2049 Singapore, one of the world’s largest crypto conferences, took place — attracting a record-breaking 25,000 attendees. The area around Marina Bay Sands transformed into a “city of future finance,” where global leaders in finance, technology, regulation, and investment converged.
This year’s discussions signaled a clear shift toward a mature phase of the industry, centered on regulation, real-world use cases, and trust architecture. Notably, U.S. regulatory frameworks and stablecoins dominated the agenda, appearing as recurring themes across multiple sessions.
The opening day’s main stage featured executives from CME, Bitwise, Circle, and Binance, underscoring the growing convergence between traditional and digital finance.
Heath Tarbert, Chief Legal Officer at Circle, described the company’s stablecoin USDC as “a partner, not a rival, to banks,” emphasizing collaboration with the existing financial system rather than disruption.
Meanwhile, Richard Teng, CEO of Binance, remarked that “the story has changed with regulatory clarity,” reporting that institutional participation has doubled year over year. He highlighted Binance’s Crypto as a Service offering — an infrastructure enabling banks to offer crypto trading under their own brands — as a core pillar of the company’s CeDeFi(Centralized-Decentralized Finance) strategy, bridging centralized and decentralized systems.
Adding momentum to this trend, PayPay’s recent investment in Binance Japan has drawn significant attention in Japan, as the two companies move to integrate crypto trading functions into domestic financial services.
