Bluechip26 in Vienna: the crypto safety conference on stablecoin risk (10–11 November 2026)

Bluechip26, The Crypto Safety Conference, takes place in Vienna on 10 and 11 November 2026. It is organised by Bluechip, a stablecoin rating agency that moved its headquarters to the Austrian capital in 2025, with Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) as presenting partner and Mastercard as strategic partner. The official conference page gives the address as Am Stadtpark 9, 1030 Vienna, and a two-day programme built around one question: who carries the risk when money moves onto a blockchain.

This is the second edition. The first, Bluechip25, ran in November 2025 at the same address. For 2026 the agenda leans hard on stablecoins, EU rules and safety, with sessions on crypto futures in the EU, tokenised securities, onchain yield, crypto cards and AI agents that hold funds.

A Vienna crypto safety conference built on stablecoin risk

Bluechip describes itself on the event page as the first independent stablecoin rating agency. Its stated goal is short: “to make crypto safer for everyone.” The format follows the same idea. The organiser promises “depth over scale” rather than a trade-show floor, and the press release of 18 March 2026 names the target audience as decision-makers from banking, regulation, payments, Web3, technology and investment.

A small consortium runs the event: Bluechip with Outrun, come in and the PR agency punktgenau.PR, according to the March press release. BearingPoint sponsors a new awards ceremony. Kinstellar, Trezor, LimeChain and Bitpanda Enterprise appear as brand partners, and the Austrian Business Agency as transport partner.

What a stablecoin rating is

A stablecoin is a token meant to hold a fixed value, usually one dollar or one euro, backed by reserves or by a mechanism. A rating tries to grade how likely that promise is to hold. Bluechip launched its ratings in July 2023 with a letter scale from A+ to F; its framework, called SMIDGE, reportedly scores six factors: stability, management, implementation, decentralisation, governance and externals. Its first report gave Tether a D grade, as DL News reported at the time. That grade is more than three years old and says nothing about current ratings.

In January 2025 the company raised a seed round of 1 million euros led by InnovaticGroup and moved its headquarters from the United States to Vienna, Trending Topics reported. In the same article Bluechip claimed that no stablecoin with a positive Bluechip rating had failed since it started. That is the company’s own claim, not an independent finding.

Programme: from stablecoin issuers to AI agents

All times below are Vienna local time (CET, one hour ahead of UTC in November), as listed on the organiser’s page on 19 October 2026. Some slots still say “to be announced”.

Day 1, Tuesday 10 November

Doors open at 09:00 with breakfast and registration. Michael Höllerer, CEO of RBI, and Benjamin Levit, co-founder and CEO of Bluechip, open the day at 10:00. Garett Jones, an economics professor who co-founded Bluechip and is its chief economist, follows at 10:15 with a talk titled “Clarity without CLARITY”. The panel after it, at 10:30, has no title or speakers yet.

Rules and money fill the late morning. Martin Hanzl of EY Law covers crypto futures in the EU at 11:30. Ben Milne of Brale speaks at 11:45 on how stablecoins change the velocity of money. At 12:00 comes the session that sums up the event, “Stablecoins From Issuer to Checkout: Who Carries the Risk?”, with no speaker listed yet.

After lunch, Marieke Flament talks at 14:00 about Europe’s blind spot in the new monetary order. Timothy Enneking of Psalion follows on tokenised securities, then Maurice Weber of Stablewatch on “The Missing Backstop in Onchain Yield” at 14:30. A keynote at 14:45 is still unnamed. A session on crypto cards (“What Users Don’t See”) is set for 15:30.

At 16:00, Christian Trummer, co-CEO of Bitpanda, and Martin Sprengseis-Kogler, managing partner at bluesource, discuss what happens when AI agents hold the keys to funds, and how that kind of agentic finance can be regulated.

Next come the first Bluechip Awards, at 16:30. There are four categories, not yet named, and the winners are picked by a ranked-choice vote of everyone attending; nominations are open through a form on the event page. Buses leave from 17:30 for a dinner from 18:30 to 22:00 at Heurigen Wolff, a Viennese wine tavern.

Day 2, Wednesday 11 November

Susanne Chishti of FINTECH Circle opens at 10:00 with “Safety Is a Board Decision, Not a Protocol Feature”. At 11:30 Sol Cinosi of Recoveris presents a case study on Zondacrypto, billed by the organiser as Europe’s biggest crypto scandal. Kostiantyn Harniuk of Hacken then argues that stablecoin ratings need a cybersecurity layer.

A panel at 12:00 asks what allocators need from on-chain funds, with Enneking, Thomas Pratter, Petr Hluze and Anton Werner. Anna Petrenko of Everstake weighs stablecoin risk against institutional opportunity at 13:30. Closing and networking run from 14:30 to 15:30. One keynote and two panels are still to be announced for that day.

Confirmed speakers

Twenty-nine speakers are listed in all. Beyond those above, the page names Ondřej Kovařík, a former MEP now advising on EU affairs; Beatrice Fares, listed as formerly at the European Commission’s financial services department (DG FISMA); Sabina Liu of KuCoin EU; Konstantin Kraus, who handles institutional partnerships for EMEA at Kraken; Christian Wolf of RBI; Christoph Pliessnig of Teroxx; and Triv of Trezor. The March press release does not name speakers, so the organiser’s page is the only reference for the line-up.

Bluechip26 tickets and price

The 2026 page has a “Get Tickets” button but publishes no price and no ticket tiers as of 19 October 2026. The March press release said “Super Early Bird” tickets were on sale at that point; whether any early-bird rate is still open is not stated. For reference only, BTC-ECHO reported that a regular ticket for Bluechip25 cost 660 euros in 2025 and that attendance was capped at 200. Neither figure has been confirmed for 2026.

Venue and getting there

The address is Am Stadtpark 9, 1030 Vienna, in the 3rd district (Landstrasse), next to the Stadtpark. The 2026 page lists this address but does not name the building. On the organiser’s 2025 recap page, the same address is given as Raiffeisen Bank International, where Bluechip25 took place.

Registration opens at 09:00 on both days. The day-1 dinner is off-site, with buses provided by the organiser. The page is in English; some third-party material on the event is in German, and the organiser has not published a language policy for the sessions.

What happened at Bluechip25

Bluechip25 ran on 6 and 7 November 2025 at the same address. The recap page lists 50 speakers; BTC-ECHO named Patrick Hansen of Circle and Johann Strobl, then CEO of RBI, among them. Day one covered stablecoins, hardware wallets, blockchain analytics and the security of exchanges and custodians. Day two moved to stablecoin fragility, DeFi, self-custody under MiCA and the recovery of lost funds. The Ethereum Foundation presented the dinner, and the talks are on Bluechip’s YouTube channel. No attendance or country figures have been published.

A follow-up press release in November 2025 noted that legal questions and the taxation of digital assets got only brief coverage that year.

Why it matters for MiCA stablecoin holders in Europe

Timing explains much of the agenda. MiCA’s stablecoin rules on reserves and e-money tokens already apply, and ESMA has told EU platforms to drop non-MiCA stablecoins by January. For users in France, Italy or elsewhere in the EU, that means some tokens may disappear from their exchange, and questions about reserves and issuers stop being theoretical. Our guide to the MiCA regulation explains what the rules cover.

Vienna has also become a licensing base. The press release lists MiCA licences granted in Austria to Bitpanda, Bybit EU, AMINA EU, Cryptonow, KuCoin EU, 21bitcoin and Coinfinity, and BingX announced its own Austrian licence on 14 October 2026. Levit put it this way in the release: “Wien hat sich als Standort für regulierte Crypto-Player zu einem Hotspot entwickelt” (Vienna has become a hotspot for regulated crypto players).

What is not known yet

Several points remain open on 19 October 2026: the 2026 ticket price and tiers, the attendance cap, the names of the four award categories, the speakers for the issuer-to-checkout and crypto-card sessions, the five slots still to be announced (three panels and two keynotes), and whether talks will be streamed live. Coindaro will update this page when the organiser publishes them.