Last week’s Cardano Summit 2025 at Berlin’s iconic Gasometer heard from 140 speakers, brought together close to 800 attendees from over 70 countries, and attracted over 25,000 online participants, showcasing significant momentum in enterprise blockchain adoption.
Across two days of strategic discussions, enterprise leaders joined the Cardano community to discuss industry readiness, DeFi expansion, and the convergence of AI with distributed systems. The Cardano Foundation also outlined its 2026 roadmap highlighting decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity, Web3 integration, and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization as key focus areas. Additionally, Singapore was unveiled as the location for next year’s Summit.
Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard set an ambitious tone as he opened the Summit by addressing the “army of changemakers” in attendance, outlining the critical role of trust in driving blockchain adoption. “Trust is the real value of decentralization,” legendary venture capitalist Tim Draper told the Summit, emphasizing how blockchain enables confidence in data and financial security. This sentiment was echoed by Johnson & Johnson’s Florian Krueger-Herbert, who highlighted blockchain’s role as a “safe, tamper-proof record that everyone can trust, from manufacturers to patients.”
The launch of the Cardano Foundation’s Blockchain Research Institute report on Digital Trust Infrastructure was a highlight of the Summit. This new framework, designed to reduce friction and boost productivity in the next economy, resonated throughout Day Two discussions, where Christoph Schneider of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation emphasized that businesses have “a lot to gain in this decentralized system.”
The urgency of trust and identity solutions became clear with Thomas Mayfield, Head of Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions at the Cardano Foundation, noting that “80% of data breaches are due to identity being compromised.”Animoca Brands’ Robby Yung described zero-knowledge proofs as a “silver bullet” allowing selective disclosure without compromising privacy.
The Summit also revealed a dramatic shift in traditional finance’s blockchain stance. Boston Consulting Group’s Bernhard Kronfellner noted that major banks have developed “FOMO,” with “two-thirds of conversations now about stablecoins.” European Commission Principal Economist Joachim Schwerin confirmed the EU’s “very positive approach to blockchain,” positioning it as a breakthrough technology. This institutional momentum was reinforced by Mastercard’s Christian Rau, who explained that “we have more optionality now than ever with payments,” highlighting stablecoins’ capacity to “solve a real issue” beyond cross-border payments, including payroll, treasury management, and DeFi applications.
These key themes and topics resonated with the recently published Cardano Foundation Roadmap which confirmed the Foundation’s continued commitment to its existing mission of Cardano adoption by legacy enterprises, and blockchain-for-good initiatives, while simultaneously outlining plans for increased efforts in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 sectors. In keeping with its commitment to remain focused on transparency, measurable outcomes, and consistent delivery across each area of the roadmap, a recent update highlighted actions undertaken and work in progress on both the DeFi and Web3 initiatives as well as the RWA, governance decentralization and promotion and education programs.
CEO Frederik Gregaard closed the Summit by positioning blockchain as a global digital trust infrastructure that counterbalances AI’s limitations, enabling secure, decentralized identity and resilience against centralization. With enterprise and institutional interest accelerating through “real, behind-closed-doors adoption discussions,” the Foundation’s strategic focus toward DeFi and Web3, while staying close to enterprise adoption, reflects the ecosystem’s maturation and readiness for mainstream blockchain implementation.