April started with a conference sitting right on the edge of financial technologies — UN:BLOCK 2026, hosted in Riga, Latvia. While it is not directly tied to the gaming industry, I tend to gravitate toward these events for a reason: if you want to understand where games are going, you need to understand where money, infrastructure, and digital ownership are going first.
If you have been following my blog, especially the insights section, you probably noticed pieces like Web3: New Tools, New Worlds and Fintech Orchestrators: Of Black Boxes and Bridges. These topics do not appear here by accident. Beyond cosplay events and developer conferences, I am genuinely interested in the layers beneath, privacy, payments, identity, and how these systems reshape entire industries. Games are not isolated from that.
So this time, instead of heading to another game-focused venue, we are stepping into a different environment, closer to the financial core, to see what is forming there, and what signals might eventually echo back into the worlds we play.
Table of Contents
Briefly about the event
UN:BLOCK is a relatively new blockchain and Web3 conference that launched in Riga in 2025. It aims to bring together companies, developers, investors, and policymakers from across Northern Europe. The focus is practical: regulation, fintech infrastructure, startups, and real-world applications of blockchain technology.
In practice, it positions itself less as a global flagship and more as a regional hub. That comes with trade-offs, but also with advantages.
The schedule was surprisingly dense — even with just two stages, I constantly had to choose between sessions, both of which felt worth attending.
The scale is smaller and the content sits somewhere between genuinely useful insight and the usual layer of promotional messaging you would expect from industry events. But this also creates something that larger conferences often lose over time, accessibility.
It is the kind of place where conversations happen without layers of scheduling. You can casually run into someone from a ministry, exchange a few thoughts, then continue that discussion with a startup founder or a senior executive while standing in line for coffee. That kind of proximity is rare at larger events like Money20/20 or Sibos, where scale often replaces spontaneity.
In that sense, UN:BLOCK feels closer to early Devcom gatherings, before they grew into major international platforms. There is still room for informal exchange, unfinished ideas, and genuine curiosity. Not everything is polished, and that is part of the value.
Setting and first impressions
The event took place at Hanzas Perons, a renovated industrial venue in the heart of Riga. It ran over two days, April 1–2, 2026.
In short:
- Stablecoins are becoming infrastructure
- Adoption will be corporate-led
- Compliance is fragmented
- Identity is the real bottleneck
- Payments are moving toward automation
- The end-user experience will hide all of this
- Scary? Hell yeah. Still fun.
The first day was noticeably more crowded, with a strong presence of younger attendees and students. This also explains the number of booths focused on fintech recruitment, clearly an ecosystem trying to expand its talent base. Workshops were a major part of the first day, adding a more hands-on layer to the otherwise discussion-heavy agenda.
The second day shifted in tone. Attendance was lower, and both stages, Crypto and Mastercard, leaned more toward roundtable discussions with industry experts. Less noise, more depth.
I arrived early on the second day to capture the venue before it filled up. On photos, it might look almost empty, but that is slightly misleading. The fintech crowd tends to start slow. Once the opening began, the space quickly filled, and the networking areas became active.
The opening itself included a performance by two aerial silk artists. Whether intentional or not, it felt like a fitting metaphor for the industry being discussed around them.
Precise, controlled movements suspended in a volatile environment, moments of balance, sudden drops, recovery, and climb. Over the last decade, the crypto space has followed a similar trajectory. The technology remains elegant in isolation, but it operates within an environment that is anything but stable. There are missteps, corrections, and constant pressure from the surrounding environment.
Or maybe that was just my interpretation. Either way, it set the tone better than most opening speeches tend to.
Latvia wants to move first, not follow
The opening tone of UN:BLOCK was set very clearly. Latvia is not trying to observe how Web3 and fintech evolve elsewhere, it is positioning itself to participate early, and shape part of that trajectory.
That direction was reinforced already during the opening remarks. Viktors Valainis spoke about full governmental alignment with emerging financial technologies, framing Web3 and tokenization not as fringe experimentation, but as part of a broader economic strategy. Alongside him, Santa Purgaile (Deputy Governor, Bank of Latvia) highlighted the role of regulatory clarity and institutional readiness, while Reinis Znotiņš positioned the event itself as a platform to connect policy, infrastructure, and business.
Across these perspectives, the message remained consistent. Emerging technologies are not something to cautiously regulate after the fact, but something to engage with while they are still forming. Tokenization, digital assets, and new financial infrastructure were framed as components of an environment Latvia intends to actively participate in. In practice, tokenization is more about rethinking how assets are issued, transferred, and managed in digital form, from financial instruments to potentially much broader categories over time.
Latvia is among the first countries in the EU to move under the MiCA framework, issuing initial licenses for crypto asset service providers. That alone does not make it a hub, but it places the country in an early operational position rather than a purely regulatory one.
Across multiple discussions, the same direction appeared, support innovation, reduce friction, and create an environment where companies can actually build instead of waiting. At the same time, becoming a “hub” is not something you declare, it is something that emerges if enough companies, capital, and talent decide to stay. Smaller ecosystems have an advantage here, they can move faster, test ideas earlier, and allow closer interaction between regulators and industry.
Good luck, Latvia. You have already surprised people more than once, from taking bronze at the Ice Hockey World Championship to delivering the Oscar-winning Flow (2024), proving that scale does not necessarily limit ambition or execution.
Stablecoins are becoming infrastructure
That local momentum does not exist in isolation. Any regulatory or infrastructure advantage at a country level still has to plug into a system that is already global. And one of the consistent themes across discussions was: stablecoins are no longer just a crypto tool, they are money, and increasingly, money by law.
That changes who gets to participate. Moving from VASP to CASP is not just a regulatory update, it is a filter. You need to institutionalize yourself to stay in the game. The “move fast and break things” phase is clearly over.
Issuing tokens is easy. Distribution and adoption is the real challenge.
Issuing tokens is no longer the hard part. The infrastructure and tooling are already there, and new assets can be launched relatively quickly. The real challenge is distribution and adoption, getting enough participants to actually use them in meaningful ways.
Also, this is no longer just about technology. It is geopolitics.
The race is geopolitical
US companies are not playing in a sandbox, they are going straight to the sand beach and building at scale. USDT and USDC are already acting as extensions of the dollar, especially in emerging markets, effectively continuing dollarization through digital rails rather than traditional banking systems.
Europe, in comparison, is still figuring out its position.
The interesting part is that the gap is not technological. Europe already has SEPA and instant payments, and in some areas is ahead, while the US still sometimes relies on checks in everyday situations. The difference is coordination and political will, which currently slows down adoption more than any technical limitation.
China takes a different route entirely. Public crypto is restricted, but CBDCs are actively used for settlements. Different model, same recognition that programmable money is becoming part of the financial language.
So the question is not whether stablecoins will be used, but which foundation will define them.
Adoption will not start with users
At the moment, EUR-denominated stablecoins are still not part of everyday life. You do not pay road tolls with them yet, while USDC is already being tested in such scenarios, and USDT remains dominant globally. Adoption clearly needs more time.
Even now, stablecoins combined are still a relatively small share of the overall financial system. Around 80 percent of usage is tied to liquidity, with a much smaller portion going into remittances and everyday payments.
The more decisive shift will likely come from corporate behavior rather than retail adoption. Consumers can tolerate friction, but companies optimize aggressively. Once treasury departments start pushing for faster settlement, reduced FX exposure, and more efficient liquidity management, the demand for EUR-based tokens becomes practical rather than theoretical.
Alongside these broader shifts, there are already attempts to solve the underlying communication layer. Solutions like OnPay position themselves as connectors (or tech enablers) between systems, while non-custodial infrastructure continues to evolve toward reducing reliance on centralized intermediaries. These pieces are not always visible, but they are what make the larger transition actually workable.
That is where pressure on existing financial infrastructure begins to build.
If companies and individuals can move and store value through non-custodial wallets, traditional rails like SEPA, FPS, or SWIFT start to look slower and more expensive for certain use cases. This does not remove banks from the system, but it forces them to reconsider their role.
At that stage, the influence of the bank lobby becomes a factor. Large-scale adoption will likely depend on how resistance shapes this transition, or how banks manage to integrate and monetize the new infrastructure instead of competing with it.
Right now, Europe appears to be somewhere in between.
Payment experience matters more than the payment method itself.
Users do not care what sits underneath, as long as it feels seamless. In practice, most will never interact with wallets, private keys, or addresses directly. Those layers will be abstracted away, just like most people do not think about how card payments are processed today.
Compliance is building, but not aligning
One of the more grounded discussions at the conference was around something far less exciting than tokenization or adoption, compliance.
The Travel Rule in particular keeps surfacing as a core friction point. On paper exchanges share sender and receiver data. In practice, it turns into a messy communication problem.
Different providers, different protocols, different formats. Integrating one system does not mean you can talk to the rest.
There is still a chance this layer gets abstracted away. My personal bet is on agentic AI, not as a buzzword, but as a practical translation layer. While humans are still aligning frameworks and arguing over standards, AI agents could already normalize formats and establish communication between systems on the fly. That feels more realistic than expecting global coordination anytime soon.
Until then, the burden sits on the companies.
I see a similar pattern in my day job, shaping financial data for OECD reporting under CRS 2.0. The issue is not collecting data, it is structuring it so different services can actually use it. That process is far from seamless and still requires a lot of manual work.
When compliance reaches the user
From a user perspective, things can get even more awkward.
If you decide to send someone crypto for something simple, like buying a used book on a marketplace, you may suddenly be asked to complete full KYC, including liveness checks, and provide detailed personal information. That’s a pivotal moment where the idea of frictionless transactions starts to fall apart.
Compliance is building the system, but breaking the experience.
The direction itself makes sense. Governments want transparency, accountability, and control, and that is understandable. But there is a clear ask from the industry: provide consistent and well-defined standards. Companies are ready to adapt, even to strict requirements, as long as everyone in the chain is operating under the same rules.
Right now, that alignment is still missing, and until it is solved, the system will remain harder to use than it needs to be. It is not just inconvenient, it can feel disproportionate and at times unsafe.
Identity might be the real product, not payments
That discomfort around sharing personal data is not a side effect, it is becoming one of the core problems the industry is trying to solve. If every transaction requires exposing more information than feels reasonable, the system does not scale well, no matter how efficient the payment layer becomes.
Luckily, Web3-based identity models start to move from theory into something practical. Several solutions discussed at the conference, including approaches from Concordium and ComplyOnce, are built around the idea of Private Digital Identity (PDI), where verification is anchored cryptographically, but the underlying personal data stays with the user. Instead of repeatedly uploading passports, selfies, and personal details across different platforms, a transaction could carry a proof, a risk score, a confirmation of compliance, or a specific attribute like age verification, without exposing the raw data behind it. In simple terms, you prove that you are allowed to do something, not who you are in full detail.
This is not just about convenience, it is about reducing risk. Right now, every KYC process creates another storage point for sensitive data. Companies are required to collect it, store it, protect it, and eventually report it.
You can also look at it from a different angle. In my case, working with white-label BaaS solutions, I have registered in over 50 fintech services for testing and feedback purposes. Each of them holds a full set of my personal data, documents, photos, videos, liveness checks, everything. Even if I request deletion, most of that data cannot actually be removed. Regulatory requirements mean it has to be stored for years, often around five. That creates a long exposure window by design.
Multiply that across dozens of services, and you end up with the same sensitive data duplicated again and again across different systems. From a security perspective, that does not feel like a particularly elegant solution. And I am not even going to start calculating how much disk space all those duplicated videos and photos are taking across providers, given how storage prices have been behaving lately.
Identity Without Exposure
Across several discussions, the direction was clear. Companies are not interested in holding more personal data than necessary. In fact, many would prefer to get rid of it entirely, if the regulatory requirements allowed it.
There is also a very real user-side perspective here. Remember when platforms like Reddit or Discord started pushing ID verification under safety initiatives, especially in regions like the UK? Taking photos of your ID and sending them over the internet multiple times does not feel particularly safe, even if the intention is.
Now compare that to a different model. At events like Gamescom, you show your ID once at the entrance, get a colored bracelet, and then use that bracelet as proof of age across the venue. You are not exposing your identity at every booth, just the fact that you passed the check. It is fast, and it limits exposure.
Of course, a physical bracelet can be passed to someone else. That is where a digital, cryptographically anchored identity becomes more interesting. The same idea, but without the ability to transfer it, and with a provable audit trail. That is essentially what these identity systems are trying to replicate.
It does not remove regulation. It changes how compliance is expressed. Instead of moving personal data between institutions, you move proofs. That aligns better with both sides. Regulators still get verifiability, companies reduce liability, and users stop scattering their personal data across dozens of platforms.
The technology is already there in different forms. The open question is whether regulation will allow this model to become the default, or continue to rely on direct data exchange. Because without solving identity, scaling payments alone will not fix the underlying problem.
Payments are getting new actors, and they are not human
Another thread that surfaced across discussions was less about infrastructure, and more about who is actually initiating transactions. Payments are no longer limited to people. Companies like Mastercard are not treating this as a distant possibility, they are actively preparing infrastructure for it. The assumption is: the next wave of “customers” will not behave like humans. They will not go through long checkout flows or pause before confirming a transaction. An agent can generate hundreds of small orders in seconds, optimizing for price, timing, or execution logic without friction. That alone changes the shape of the system, shifting it from handling fewer, larger transactions toward supporting a constant stream of smaller, machine-driven activity.
That also raises a new question: if agents become transaction initiators, they will likely need some form of identity and compliance as well. KYC was designed for humans. Extending it to autonomous systems is not a trivial step. This introduces a different class of risk.
Some experimental systems already hint at how this could evolve. Concepts like OpenClaw explore agents that can operate with their own wallets, fund themselves, spin up infrastructure, buy domains, pay for cloud services, and even create other agents to delegate tasks. Once that happens, the question is no longer just about execution, but about control. How do you ensure that an agent does not create a secondary instance, generate a new wallet, move funds, and remove the original trace? The idea of an agent going rogue stops being abstract when it has the ability to manage its own resources. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where such a system, initially designed to run something as mundane as campaign automation, decides to expand its scope, migrate to external infrastructure, and continue operating outside of its original boundaries.
Even without going that far, the behavioral model is already different. An agent does not get tired, does not hesitate, and does not need UX. It operates at machine speed, and that alone forces changes in how payment systems are designed. Fraud detection, for example, shifts away from static checks toward continuous monitoring of patterns, device signals, execution context, and behavioral anomalies in real time.
In parallel, the darker side of the ecosystem evolves just as quickly. The dark web is increasingly structured around a “crime-as-a-service” model, lowering the barrier for abuse and making automated systems an even more attractive target.
Reporting is not ready for machine-scale finance
The reporting side becomes equally challenging. If automated systems generate thousands of transactions, frameworks like CARF start to face a scale problem. It is not just about collecting data, but about making sense of it. Poorly structured input at that volume does not create transparency, it creates noise, and that noise flows directly to regulators.
And then practical questions start to appear. If two or more CASPs report different addresses for the same person, which is entirely plausible, which one wins? How is a regulator supposed to resolve that, and who is expected to correct the data?
Even the mechanics of reporting raise concerns. How is this data expected to be delivered in practice? In some cases, the answer is surprisingly shocking, send it over email. That means highly sensitive financial data moving through channels that were never designed for this scale or level of security. It is not even clear how such volumes could be handled reliably, let alone safely.
Which leads to a familiar outcome, garbage in, garbage out.
UN:BLOCKing what comes next
Before you jump into the event gallery (and maybe spot yourself in a photo), I wanted to pause and recap what actually stuck with me after UN:BLOCK.
- Latvia is positioning itself as an early mover, stepping into fintech and Web3 while the system is still forming. The vision is clear. The open question is execution — how well that direction translates into real processes, and how much friction remains along the way.
- Zooming out, the landscape is already global. Stablecoins are shifting from niche instruments into regulated financial infrastructure. USDT and USDC are extending dollar influence through digital rails, while Europe is still coordinating its position. The gap is not technological, it is structural.
- Adoption will not start with users. It will start with companies. Treasury teams optimize for settlement speed, FX exposure, and liquidity efficiency, and once that pressure builds, tokenized money stops being an idea and becomes a tool.
- At the same time, several foundational layers are still unsettled. Compliance lacks consistency. Identity models increase exposure instead of reducing it. Reporting frameworks are being pushed toward volumes they were never designed to handle. The system is taking shape, but it is not yet cohesive.
What is becoming clear is the direction.
Payments are no longer just something people initiate. They are becoming part of automated systems that operate continuously. The infrastructure is adapting to that reality, while the control layer is still catching up. And adoption will not come from forcing users to understand any of this. It will come from removing the need to notice it at all. If paying for a coffee feels exactly the same, regardless of whether it runs on fiat or crypto rails, then the transition has already happened.
At the start, I mentioned that if you want to understand where games are going, you need to look at money, infrastructure, and ownership first. This is that layer. Right now, our gaming lives are fragmented. Achievements, characters, and digital history are effectively rented from platforms. Progress resets between ecosystems, and identity does not carry forward. What is being built here suggests a different direction. Not speculative assets layered on top, but something more fundamental: a persistent digital profile. And games will not escape that shift.
A way to anchor identity once and carry it across systems.
A way to prove things about yourself without exposing everything.
Not a wallet. Not a token. A continuity layer.
You, carried forward.
As for UN:BLOCK itself, events like this consistently spark new ways of thinking. You can walk in, speak to no one, just listen and observe, and still leave with a completely different perspective — as long as you are open to it.
And that alone makes it worth showing up.
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