TUM Blockchain Conference 2026 (29-31 October, Munich): research, banks and a 30-hour hackathon

The TUM Blockchain Conference 2026 runs from 29 to 31 October 2026 at the House of Communication, Friedenstrasse 24, in Munich’s Werksviertel district. It is organised by the TUM Blockchain Club, a registered non-profit and accredited student club of the Technical University of Munich, and this is the fourth edition. The format grows this year. Thursday is a research and builders day, Friday becomes a Digital Assets Day for banks, supervisors and large companies, and a 30-hour Blockchain & AI hackathon runs from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon.

One ticket covers all three days, according to the official conference site. The site’s Buy Tickets button leads to the organiser’s ticket page on Luma, which on 19 October 2026 listed four tiers: a student ticket at €9, valid with a student ID; a self-funded ticket at €79 for people paying out of their own pocket, subject to the organiser’s approval; General Admission at €249; and a VIP ticket at €499 that adds the VIP and speaker lounge, catering and side events. The €199 early-bird rate closed on 31 July, and no tier was marked sold out.

TUM Blockchain Conference 2026 programme: Thursday is for research and builders

Day one, Thursday 29 October, starts at 09:00 local time (08:00 UTC) on three stages named Nakamoto, Turing and Hopper, with lunch at 12:45 and the last sessions starting at 16:35, according to the published agenda. Felix Rihacek, president of the TUM Blockchain Club, opens the day on the Nakamoto stage. The organiser calls the programme a working draft, and several slots still read “Title to be announced” or “Speaker TBA”.

The Nakamoto main stage mixes markets and rules. Per Möller of SwissBorg and Julian Ullrich of stabble discuss whether centralised and decentralised exchanges are converging or competing, and at 10:05 Andre Liesenfeld of Microsoft Germany looks at cloud infrastructure for the machine economy. At 10:50 a technical regulatory panel with Billy Rennekamp, Dr Nina-Luisa Siedler of siedler legal and Ondřej Kovařík of the European Ethereum Institute looks at autonomous code and EU regulation. Later slots cover how prediction markets resolve (11:35), a crypto venture capital panel (13:30), 1inch Aqua presented by Vadim Fadeev (15:00), privacy on Solana (15:30) and a panel on AI and smart-contract security with speakers from Adevar Labs, Softstack and Iknaio (16:05).

The Turing stage is the academic one. Vadim Lyubashevsky of IBM Research Europe, a lattice cryptography researcher, speaks at 11:20 on a topic not yet announced. Marek Sefranek of TU Wien presents “Plonk Without Random Oracles”, Andrew Zitek-Estrada of EPFL covers post-quantum Arkworks and Merkle commitments, and Gopi Kannappan reports on six months of attempts to break ECDSA on a public benchmark. Sergey Shemyakov of L2BEAT asks how to stay private on a public chain, and François-Xavier Wicht of the University of Bern talks about ephemeral coin tracing. In the afternoon Arman Kolozyan of CISPA presents a language-agnostic way to find bugs in zero-knowledge proof programs (14:05), and William Wang of New York University follows with fast proving for batch Boolean computations (14:35). Much of this sits close to zero-knowledge proofs and to the current debate on quantum computing and crypto signatures.

Hopper is the security room. Tarkan Yavas opens at 10:50 with key compromises, bridge exploits and the limits of security audits. Nikita Eriashev looks at hardware wallets “after a year of record hacks” at 13:35, a 14:05 session covers tokenised assets from Ondo, xStocks and Paxos, and Sveinn Valfells compares European payment rails with the global giants at 14:50.

Digital Assets Day: German banks, the Bundesbank and MiCA 2.0

Friday 30 October is new. The Digital Assets Day is curated by Bundesblock, the German blockchain association, and targets policymakers, regulators, financial institutions and corporates. Arrival is from 08:00, sessions run until about 18:00, and there are again three stages: Main, Executive Forum and Future Stage.

The Main Stage opens at 09:10 with Manfred Richels of the Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband on the state of digital assets in 2026. At 09:25 Christoph Hock of Union Investment and Hagen Weiss of PwC Legal discuss the French-German task force on the future of financial markets. Franziska Huber of the Deutsche Bundesbank follows at 09:45 with a talk titled “From Digital Euro to Stablecoin Rails”, and a 10:00 panel on “The New Money Stack” includes Ramin Ghafari of Siemens and Henri de Jong of Quantoz. Simone Cortese of Fnality and Christian Bock of Talos take capital markets at 11:10; Martin Kreitmair of Tangany and Niclas Voigt of Commerzbank discuss custody and identity at 14:55. Also on the Main Stage, at 14:15, Dr Lewin Boehnke of Crypto Finance (Deutsche Börse Group) joins a session on building European financial champions in the German-speaking markets, and at 16:15 a talk covers the EU Business Wallet and the “Deutschland Stack” as public digital infrastructure.

The regulatory slot comes late, at 16:35: Alireza Siadat of Deloitte Legal, Dr Mara Hartsperger of Baader Bank and Dr Siedler on MiCA 2.0, DAC8, DORA, tax and competitiveness. For readers who want the basics first, our guide to the MiCA regulation covers the current rules, and the first EU exchange of crypto tax data under DAC8 is due on 30 September 2027.

The Executive Forum is more corporate. Peter Busch of Bosch gives an AI and blockchain briefing at 09:35. At 11:00 Valerie von Lucke of Commerzbank, Bernhard Schweizer of SAP, Paul Wong of the Stellar Development Foundation, Victor Bergmann of Google Cloud and Prof. Philipp Maume of TUM discuss corporate treasuries and payments by AI agents. Michael Cyrus of DekaBank speaks on European banking consortia at 13:25, and Alexander Höptner, CEO of AllUnity, gives a call to action on innovation at 13:55.

The Future Stage has the more unusual items: a digital product passport, steel tokenisation with SC Steelcoin, and Gerhard Wimmer of Skygate on an aviation company’s MiCAR-compliant token (11:40). At 14:40 David Kurz of Bitvavo, Charles Moussy of Bybit and Marco Bodewein of Bullish join Alireza Siadat to debate leaders and laggards among financial institutions, and at 16:20 Florian Wimmer of Blockpit and Marie Christin Rinke argue about crypto taxation in Germany and Austria. The banking side of this is already moving: see our report on Deutsche Bank’s entry in the MiCA register and its custody plans.

Blockchain & AI hackathon: 30 hours, €12,000 in cash prizes

The hackathon starts on Friday 30 October at 09:00 and ends on Saturday 31 October at 15:00, which makes 30 hours, according to the hackathon site and the TUM event page. Judging takes place at the partner booths, and winners are announced at the closing ceremony, which starts at 17:30 on Saturday. Some listings still mention 32 hours and a smaller prize pool; the organiser’s page is the reference.

The organiser lists €4,000 from the BSV Association, €6,000 from Cardano and €2,000 from API3, so more than €12,000 in cash, plus €16,000 in audit credits from the TUM Blockchain Club. Applications go through tum.devfolio.co. The hackathon site states no eligibility rules or fee. The TUM event page says the event is open to all and needs no prior knowledge. Sponsor workshops from BSV Association, Cardano and API3 are planned, with times still to be announced.

Speakers and sponsors announced so far

The speakers page listed 105 names on 19 October, against 98 on 17 October, with more to come and a call for speakers still open. Among them: Dr Lewin Boehnke of Crypto Finance (Deutsche Börse Group), Dr Mara Hartsperger of Baader Bank, Patricia Albrecht of Solana Germany, Fabian Bormann of the Cardano Foundation, Radoslav Albrecht of Bitbond, Christoph Jentzsch of beel and Andre Liesenfeld of Microsoft Germany. Names such as Justin Drake or Patrick Hansen that appear on some pages are 2025 speakers, not part of the 2026 list.

Cardano and Crypto Finance are gold sponsors, Staking Facilities is silver, and the bronze tier includes Adevar Labs, Cake Wallet, Fnality, Neodyme, Talos, Tangany and softstack. tokenforge sponsors the tokenisation track and Crystal Intelligence the institutional trust track. BTC-ECHO and the Digital Euro Association are among the media and community partners.

Side events in Munich around the conference

The organiser’s side events page lists three so far. Ethereum Munich #8 takes place on Wednesday 28 October from 18:30 to 21:30 at PATO, Königinstrasse 34; it is free and in English, but the host approves each registration, and pickleball is on the evening’s programme. DARTE Munich 2.0, a roundtable on crypto investigations organised by siedler legal at PwC Munich, runs on Thursday from 14:00 to 18:00 and is by invitation only.

The Crypto Tax & Crime Konferenz 2026, organised by Matthias Steger Consulting and AQ Forensics, is held at the House of Communication on Friday from 09:00 to 16:00. It is free and in German, with limited seats and its own registration. The conference ticket does not cover it.

Tickets and getting to the House of Communication

Tickets are sold through the organiser’s Luma page, at the prices given above; the self-funded tier needs approval and the student tier a valid student ID. According to the Digital Assets Day page, Bundesblock members can ask the association’s team about a discount. The event is in person only: we found no stream and no online ticket.

The venue is about 500 metres from München Ostbahnhof. Any S-Bahn line or the U5 underground stops there; use the Friedenstrasse / Werksviertel exit. From the airport, the S8 reaches Ostbahnhof in about 35 minutes and runs around the clock. The organiser gives no accommodation advice.

From the Deutsches Museum to a three-day format

The first edition took place on 22 and 23 September 2023 at the Deutsches Museum, with more than 50 talks, panels and workshops on three stages plus a workshop room, BTC-ECHO reported at the time. The 2024 edition, again at the Deutsches Museum on 12 and 13 September, was announced with more than 70 speakers; a later message from the organiser claims more than 1,000 attendees and over 100 speakers, and we found no explanation for the gap between the two speaker counts.

In 2025 the conference moved to the House of Communication (11 and 12 September). The organiser now says it drew more than 1,200 attendees and 125 speakers, with 18 sponsors, 57 talks and 12 panels. These are its own figures; we found no independent count. The 2026 edition moves from September to late October and adds the Digital Assets Day and the hackathon, both described by Bundesblock as first-time formats. Coverage of the 2026 line-up so far comes from the organiser, event listings and one sponsored press release.

Why the Munich agenda matters for readers in France and Italy

Munich is a short flight from Paris or Milan, but the trip is not the point. The Friday programme reads like a map of what German savings banks, Commerzbank, DekaBank, the Bundesbank, Siemens, SAP and Bosch are building under MiCA: tokenised securities, stablecoins, custody, payments between machines. The French-German task force session links the debate directly to Paris. The Thursday research track, with lattice cryptography and ECDSA benchmarks, feeds the post-quantum discussion.

We found no African speaker or session on the programme.

What is still unknown

The end time of the closing ceremony; the hackathon workshop times; the titles and speakers still marked TBA; the hackathon’s eligibility rules and any fee; whether talks will be streamed or recorded. The agenda can still change before 29 October.