CTRL/SHIFT - 13 06 2026 PARTHENOPE STAGE - GLENN TAN - A NEW ERA FOR WEB3

Yeah, Gleb will explain the convergence of Web3 and AI, which is of course being discussed everywhere. Uh he is representing Blockchain for Good Alliance, a global nonprofit initiative founded by Bybit, and is dedicated to harnessing blockchain for real-world social impact. He has represented BGA at the UN, at UNDP AltFin Lab, and many other, I would say, very prominent organizations. So, we should have the slides in a bit, and you will walk us through your speech.

How do I change the slides? All right. So, while we're waiting for the slide, uh I have I have nothing filled in for stand-up comedy, because before the slide, so I got nothing much to say right now. So, let's just see what happens. Like but yes, thank you for the very warm introduction.

So, my name is Gleb. I'm the director of Global Affairs at the Blockchain for Good Alliance, that is known as the BGA for short, and it is a global nonprofit founded by Bybit. So, while I wait for the slides, maybe just a quick overview of like what the entire talk is going to be about. It's really a deep dive into the convergence of AI and blockchain. Like what was mentioned earlier, it is something that, you know, the industry is going very heavily about, because blockchain and AI are both, you know, hot words of its time.

We kind of went by that, you know, had that whole narrative that blockchain and crypto are speculative, that that these two keywords are like hot in the industry. Now we're entering the AI phase, but it's also interesting to explore the convergence of both these phenomena together, and what they can really do for real-world social impact, as well as for public good systems that governments and the UN agencies can adopt. And I see my slides over there, so we can finally get this started. So, that was pretty much the gist of what I'm going to talk about, and let's go into a bit of more of a deep dive into what this entire topic really is. But, of course, is this working?

Hello. Hello. Oh, it's not working. It will Oh, it works. Okay, fantastic.

So, before I really diving into the talk itself, of course, a not-so-salesy pitch about what the Blockchain for Good Alliance really is. Of course, I mentioned earlier, we are the global nonprofit arm of Bybit, and as it stands right now, we are the largest ecosystem and the largest players in the blockchain sector pushing the narrative that blockchain can be a very useful tool for social impact. And Okay, next one. And of course, really, why were we founded by Bybit in 2024? We just turned about 2 years old just very, very recently.

Back then, the founders of Bybit realized there is an interesting gap in the market, you know, not really many people are really pushing this narrative that blockchain, crypto, Web3 can be not just for speculative purposes, but for things that matter more to people, to communities all around the world, things that really impact lives. So, with most of the industry really just centered on speculation back then, a little bit less now, but back then, it was really the hype. We realized that we can be something more. We can be purpose over profit, and that's why we were founded. So, we are this global platform that's dedicated to pushing blockchain forward for real-world impact.

At the same time, impact projects are something that receives a little bit less attention when we talk about things like fundraising. When we talk about fundraising from your pre-seed, to your seed, series A, yada, yada, yada, it's already very tough for founders to be able to fundraise properly. When you talk about impact projects, people think that impact isn't isn't [snorts] sexy. It's not something that's exciting. It doesn't excite family offices or VCs.

And at the same time, the entire industry is so fragmented, and you throw blockchain into the mix, and you talk about blockchain and impact, that narrative gets even less. So, our initiatives for the BGA really run in synergy to really push forward the motion that blockchain and impact can be something that is business, that is purposeful, and also can be profit driving. At the same time, the industry really lacks this bridge to institutions, to NGOs, and other forms of organizations that really help to, you know, push these sorts of movements forward. So, we're here to convene that as the bridge to connect all the different partners within our ecosystem into, you know, for more blockchain for good kind of purpose. So, we don't just back projects blindly.

We really are here to scale up impactful purposes and to change the world with blockchain. A noble goal, but thankfully being well backed by the world's number two exchange, this gives us a lot of leeway to push this narrative forward. So, of course, there's some top-line numbers. Really, we work with over 600 different alliance partners around the world. We have, as it stands right now, more than 1,000 projects in our ecosystem.

And of course, we work with many different partner types and have been involved in many different events. At the same time, with our global reach, we have a very wide impression count of Of course, we reach many people all around the world. So, big numbers over there to really talk about. And diving more into what we really do for BGA, our four main initiatives, we like to call it. We sponsor hackathons and events all around the world, which is why we're also here at Control Shift.

We're also sponsoring a hackathon here. We have an internal incubation program. This is where we give equity-free grants, resources from legal, compliance, marketing, branding, you name it, we have it. We give the forms of support to the different incubatees that we have. We also run what we call the joint fund.

This is a, like the name suggests, right? It's a collaborative funding pool where we work with different partners. You know, we encourage more builders to build on our partners' ecosystems while maintaining a blockchain for good ethos, and that's how we join synergies, join resources together. And last but not least, the BGA Awards. This is an annual convention we hold in November every year.

We piloted our inaugural one in 2024 in Bangkok. Back then, it was called the Web3 Oscars. Last year, we did something much larger with our major partners at the UNDP, the United Nations Development Program. We held it at UN City and that was a very impactful, the first of its kind in the blockchain sector for blockchain and impact. And this year we are also hosting something really big as well.

So do do kind of like hold out for that and we will give you more information really soon. And of course, the last pillar that we are piloting this year is known as the BGA Impact Leaders Summit. This is something that we do together with policy makers, you know, and also different types of regulators as well as government and UN officials to pull them together into a common room to share dialogue and in a round table setting in a private discussion on how the world can really push blockchain forward. So we held the first one at the UK Houses of Parliament in the House of Lords and this year we're working very closely with other major players as well. In fact, tomorrow we are running something here as well.

There's another version of the Impact Leaders Summit that's going to be at the chapel tomorrow evening. So if you guys are here, do come join us for that one. And of course, just a quick shoutout before I continue with our 2026 incubation projects. We serve five different types of projects right now across different types of areas. I won't take too long to dive into this one.

And let's go on to really what we want to talk about today. So, really, when we talk about the convergence of blockchain and AI, we are seeing two different parallels that are really converging together. When we talk about blockchain, some of its strongest strength lies in trust and coordination. When I talk about AI, we talk about intelligence as well as automation. A lot of people think that the two are very separate things.

They are, you know, not really synonymous with each other and they don't really have much synergy, but that's not true. Together, blockchain and AI really gives autonomous as well as verifiable systems. And so this whole concept of blockchain's crossover with AI is no longer just a trend. It is an entire systems shift in the whole industry. And for us, we have also expanded our directives.

What I mean? Interesting one, just about a couple of weeks ago. And for most of you, there's nothing religious here, but Pope Leo, right? Just in the end of May, he said one thing that was very interesting. AI should be disarmed.

He didn't say that it should be destroyed, right? He said it should be disarmed. And to be disarmed it means to be freed from systems of domination, you know, and to be made answerable to the common good. So he wrote this in the Magnificat Humanitatis, which is his first papal encyclical. So it is very interesting to have such a major world figure really talking about AI.

And at the end of the day when we think about it, a technology gets called to be disarmed when it has become powerful enough to run without us, to become something that is not answerable to humanity at all, something that is not accountable, something that's not verifiable. So this is the exact world that we are pushing towards right now for public good systems. So today, on behalf of the Blockchain for Good Alliance really, it's about what actually makes this answer that is AI accountable. And that answer can seriously be blockchain. At the end of the day everybody seems to be selling the convergence of AI and blockchain as some sort of product, right?

Jumping on trends. You see AI rappers, you see trading bots, you see agentic demos. By the end of the day it's an institutional issue. It's not just one product and that's it. We really see how AI is now writing code.

I'm sure most of you have touched open like like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Maybe you're vibe coding with Claude. It's so easy now to create all sorts of, you know, all sorts of programs, all sorts of code. And AI agents are also executing transactions. They are also making decisions at very high machine speeds.

Something that perhaps we should be wary of when they start to do it inside financial systems and ecosystems meant for the public good. Public services and everything else are starting to shift in this direction. We're not going to see this trend stop. No way. But at the end of the day we think that this is something that sounds so sci-fi, but it's not true because this has already been happening the past year.

At the end of the day AI agents now can hold wallets. They can execute transactions. They can on stablecoin rails. They can do it programmatically. Protocols like X402 as well as Google's AP2, and Google's one is used by major players like MX, like Mastercard, like Coinbase, and all of them have AI agents now that can transact without human intervention.

The new Ethereum standard for ERC 8004 gives agents an on-chain identity as well as the ability to have reputation, and there are thousands of registered interests within its first weeks of launch. And just about a couple months ago in March, they had a major demo, and that was extremely well received as well. So, this is the direction that we're going to see the industry moving towards. And at the BGA, we talked to a lot of institutions, the government agencies, UN agencies, some of the public service offices right here in Italy that I had the opportunity to talk to at the booth that we have over here as well. Also did mention that blockchain and AI are being piloted to some degree in the public ecosystems.

So, we start to see compliance agents that actually monitor transactions and allow people to file regulatory reports starting to come up. So, perhaps right now is really a good time for us to think about what we're going to talk about, right? Asian volume still represents a pretty small fraction of transactions. Perhaps now is a good time for us to build the guardrails. The entire industry has already shifted.

Blockchain is no longer seen as crypto, it's no longer just seen as a hype word, it has become infrastructure. It's no longer speculation. We see the institutions that the BGA working with starting to enter the space properly, and real-world deployment is really happening in blockchain for impact type projects. At the end of the day, when you throw AI into the mix, intelligence no longer is the missing layer. What's missing now is accountability, and that's a very major word.

Verification then becomes the most available layer in the market right now. AI generates outputs, it generates predictions, it generates actions. Whereas blockchain, what can blockchain really do? Blockchain ensures provenance, it ensures trust, it ensures auditability. So, at the end in an increasingly AI world, truth really becomes that bottleneck that we should all look out for.

And some real world insights, right? When you think about AI without Web3 or Web3 without AI. When you talk about AI without Web3, you get black box decisions. You don't know most people do not know how the outputs come about. We don't care.

We just use ChatGPT, we just use Cloud. You've no idea what the heck goes into it. There's no verifiability over where the information actually comes from. There is centralized control. If you guys think about it, right now there's a new There's a new interesting word going around, right?

There's a new acronym called MANGOs. Have you guys heard of that? M A N G O S. Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, as well as what's S stand for again? Ah, SpaceX.

That's the interesting thing. So, MANGOs, we're going to see the power behind AI centralized onto these major figures. So, there's centralized control when you talk about AI without Web3. What about Web3 without AI? We talk about Web3 without AI, it's very static systems.

You really need to understand how crypto works, how blockchain works. Even until now, you really kind of need to understand how all the technical terms like gas token works. So, it's very static, and you need to manually sign on everything. There's manual execution, and that actually hinders scalability. So, this is something major, right?

Because the whole industry, everybody in crypto, blockchain, Web3, for the past what? 5, 6 years, even from the COVID time till now, everybody has been shouting at every convention, "Mass adoption. We're getting there. We're getting very close." But, it's not true.

Because when you think about it, if there isn't the ability for Web3 applications, blockchain applications, to be impactful, to be used by many people across many jurisdictions, the scalability is going to be limited. It's going to be very, very seriously limited. So, quick example, right? When we talk about humanitarian aid distribution, just to kind of give like a picture to what we're talking about here, about AI without Web3, Web3 without AI. Today, there are multiple projects out there piloted by UN ecosystems, by different governments around the world that decides where aid actually goes.

But, that's a black box. Because when AI comes in to say, "Okay, this person should get this amount of aid at this amount of value and when, this actually doesn't really tell the beneficiary why he or she did or did not get the aid. And at the end of the day, there are a lot of projects right now that also utilize blockchain and they and they brand themselves as blockchain for good because why? They can trace where the funds actually go. They say that, hey, you know, when you integrate our blockchain for good applications, you're able to understand where your funds actually go.

Donors can understand whether the beneficiary gets the funds, that sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, it's also just a static record. So, what really gives this accountability and what really gives this verifiability is when decision logic, data, disbursement, everything becomes verifiable on chain. So, everybody in the entire ecosystem when you talk about humanitarian aid can actually understand what's going on. They can audit the why, not just what's going on.

So, is this already in existence though? Not quite, not really. We have a couple of interesting examples that we talked to with our stakeholders pretty regularly. One of them is the building blocks program of the World Food Program comes pretty close. Another partner that we work with or we want to work with very soon is UNICEF.

UNICEF has a venture fund and their venture fund is also has interesting use cases. They actually had a strategic a strategic outlook on combining AI analytics together with blockchain to talk about how its funds go. And of course, some of our new partners over at the Tokenization Foundation just last month did talk about piloting something like this here for humanitarian aid distribution, but we're not quite there yet. But this is the kind of like the ideal picture of what we want to see in the world when we talk about blockchain and AI coming together for social good, for public impact. So, really, the entire question is not about whether AI will reshape public good systems.

We already know that it has. We already do know that it will not stop. It already does. The question that remains is whether these systems will still be accountable. So, just sharing some quick insights as well on what's going on in the industry.

The first one, of course, blockchain's institutional adoption has proven to be a governance challenge. We've spoken to many agencies all around the world. We had a pretty big forum last year in Copenhagen. We brought together different regulators, different UN agencies to talk about what is going on. Why is blockchain not being adopted as fast as it is?

It is very hindered by governance issues, procurement programs, you know, all sorts of contractual issues that really prevent the different blockchain projects from being adopted by the countries that it's meant to be. So, at the end of the day, this still kind of shows that just because you have something that's decentralized, just because you have blockchain, it doesn't automatically means it's trustable by default. Most people still actually have this level of resistance when we talk about blockchain or even AI right now. At the end of the day, what does this require? It requires data integrity systems to verify inputs.

It needs institutional frameworks that are strong. And the last and most important point is a human-centered design. Most of what we do today, like what I mentioned earlier, they do not put the humans first. When you think about it, profit comes first. In many situations, profit always comes first.

It's always about which stocks will go up next. You know, where AI for prediction markets are something that's very strong as well. Many things fail to see that. And as a result, the overall kind of like outcome of that is that many jurisdictions, many institutions, many people still do not trust blockchain at all. So, at the end of the day, trust becomes a system level outcome.

It's not a feature. In order to really get it adopted properly, we need to really ensure that the entire chain from the input all the way to the output, everything is properly audited, properly verified, something that can easily be trusted by people, and they know why. They don't just trust it blindly because some UN company or some politician says so. Number two. Autonomous doesn't mean unaccountable.

So, ERC 8004 talks about, you know, agents on chain having identity, being able to execute transactions. Agents now hold wallets, and they can act on their own. You can just do anything, pretty much anything you want to do with it. But at the end of the day, what happens? The first accountability question isn't what happened if something goes wrong.

It's, you know, who did this, under whose authority, within what limits. These are things that the market itself doesn't yet answer. Blockchain provides the answer to this. We can be able to tell who did what action, under whose authority, under what limits. So, the principle this entire industry must converge on blockchain AI, blockchain and AI.

It has to converge on one thing, the understanding that behind every autonomous agent, there is still a human or even an institution that stays responsible for it. It has to be verified. Because at the end of the day, autonomy without identity is just unattributable power. On-chain, when you throw blockchain into the mix of AI, this is where every action has an author. We can easily check who's responsible for the inputs.

And this is what we really mean by blockchain and AI for good. Number three, verifiability and privacy are not trade-offs. This is something that a lot of people have a misconception of. And because they're not trade-offs, this is why public good systems leveraging blockchain for social impact is really possible. What does this mean?

When we talk about putting aid, health, identity decisions, medical records, even in some projects, when you put all these on-chain, people tend to think it exposes the most vulnerable communities and data. In fact, I think we kind of the industry kind of has a little bit of a misconception given to people. We always talk about how blockchain and crypto is transparent. And at the same time when talk about them being transparent, people kind of think that I'm not going to use it. Why?

Because my identity is going to be exposed. And that's also a reason why institutions become very hesitant to adopt blockchain. But that's not true. And that's where ZK proofs really come in. So, I'm not going to dive too deep into ZK, of course, for zero-knowledge proofs, but it's a very cool example because the Spanish Red Cross actually is piloting something called Red Chain.

So, Red Chain is another partner that right now I'm talking a little bit to to potentially work out something that we may be able to work work with Spanish Red Cross. This is where we actually keep personal data off chain while still giving donors something verifiable, something auditable, and that's where we can say that if an industry or other organization like the Red Cross itself is able to pilot something like this, we may well be able to push blockchain AI for good forward within the next within the near within the near [clears throat] future probably. So, accountability shouldn't cost privacy, that's a completely mis misconstrued kind of a notion and that's where zero knowledge actually comes in properly. Number four of course, regulation is becoming an accountability spec. And it's very interesting to be having the opportunity to talk about it in Europe right now.

Because in Europe we everybody here is moving towards auditability, is moving towards transparency obligations. MiCA MiCA is there for digital assets and of course you have the AI Act here for higher risk AI. All these are really the right moves. I actually think that a lot of jurisdictions should actually follow this. And at the end of the day the institutions that win do not fight these rules.

They are actually able to produce audit trails on demand. So, regulators that we want to convene at the BGA, we already know that they are writing the spec for accountability. But the missing layer is still blockchain. When blockchain becomes regulated as a requirement for AI applications, for AI's adoption in societies, that's how we'll pass the audit. That's how we will ensure public good due to blockchain.

Now of course BGA's outlook, what do we think about the near future? We think there is a strong rise of invisible blockchain integration. And when we talk about invisible blockchain integration, what do we mean? When you call a Uber here, when you call your food delivery apps, you have no idea what technology it is. When you post something on Instagram, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, you have no idea what that is either.

And that is where we see mass adoption coming in. The alliance holds the position that once you put blockchain as an invisible entity that powers the applications, that gives the right kind of trust, the right kind of rise of public infrastructure that leverages both the benefits of blockchain and AI to its best. So, AI and blockchain's convergence is a definite 100%. We're going to rush into it faster than ever before and it's going to be something that is going to be unstoppable. But here we can still have the guardrails.

When there's institutional that adoption, when there's the right regulations in place, we are able to really push forward that blockchain's abilities for trust, for coordination can match the abilities of AI for autonomy as well as intelligent actions. So at the end of the day, outcome driven regulation is something that's very deeply important and what we at the BGA are pushing forward towards this year as well as the very near future. So blockchain and AI will really win not by being louder, it will win by being embedded into public good ecosystems when people benefit from its best parts without understanding what it really is about, but they know that it can be trusted. So the next wave of blockchain is not just tokens. We've long gone by that era.

We are talking to institutions, talking to projects. We have completely went beyond just the hype of it, which is something that the whole industry should be really proud of. What is next for us as industry for blockchain and especially for blockchain for good is a world where real world systems run without us, but are still accountable to us because as AI grows, blockchain grows with it because it is the guardrail that keeps it secure, that keeps it ultimately auditable, verifiable and trustable. So open shoutout. Join us at the alliance.

The BGA is an open ecosystem. We always regularly invite different players, projects to join the ecosystem. Our website chainforgood.org is very open for anybody to throw in an application. You can have access to our different events, our upcoming programs.

We do have things that are pretty exciting. We regularly sponsor events and hackathons as well as incubation programs. And when you join us, you can access also the different high quality impact projects that we have. You can co-brand, you can co-brand yourselves along very impactful names like UN agencies that we work with like Bybit that founded us and other major other major blockchain players that are in the market right now as well. So we do want to provide our our membership accounts also access to the different programs that we run from panels, booths, medias, workshop, and ultimately it's really an open call to collaborate with us to push blockchain and now AI forward.

So, just a quick one as well. Our incubation is going to open for another cohort. So, this was something that was very highlighted to us at our booth earlier. So, our incubation runs two cohorts a year and we are now expanding the notion towards just AI as well. It's not just going to be purely about blockchain.

So, literally right now we are what? 13th of June. At the end of the month we will open the next cohort for autumn. This is going to be a 3-month program. We give equity-free grants, mentorship support, resource access, and ultimately there is a feature at the impact forum at the impactful convention that we have that we run at the end of every year in November.

And of course, last but not least, there's consideration for all projects for what we call the Ascent track, which is a much higher form of incubation support. So, just quick example, we backed a project called EthicHub, which is a Spanish project that benefits coffee farmers. Some of you in the room have came by the the booth that we had. Some of you have the little bag made out of coffee beans that we also have on project itself. So, they actually had a million dollars in investment from Bybit itself.

So, that was also something that we really look forward to for more projects like this. And with the rise of AI as well, we also tend to see a lot more AI projects applying for our incubation program. So, this is something that we're really looking forward to. Things that utilize blockchain and AI properly, not just slapping a token onto an AI project or throwing some AI wrapper onto a blockchain project and calling it, "Hey, that's blockchain and AI." Not really what we're looking for.

But of course, yes, this is Blockchain for Good. This is us. You can connect me on LinkedIn. You can find a little bit more about me on the on the larger on the larger QR code. And you want to find out more about BGA, our website, our X, and our LinkedIn is there.

Yes, I do know that they gave me 40 minutes to run this. It's only been about 25 minutes here. It's been about 25 minutes, but that's the end of my presentation. So, I hope this was at least a little bit insightful when we talk about how blockchain and AI can really come together. Thank you.

[applause]

Yeah.