TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026 sold out before the doors opened. On 7 and 8 October, roughly 25,000 attendees from 160 countries filled all five floors of Marina Bay Sands, with 250 speakers across six stages and 500 exhibitors. With the Dubai edition moved to 2027, Singapore carried the full weight of the year, and it delivered. Trading firms still had the biggest booths, but the conversations that mattered were about payments, tokenization and putting stablecoins to work. Here are the highlights that stood out.
Best Partnership: ZIG Finance and World Liberty Financial
The partnership that best captured the mood of the week landed on 6 October, as TOKEN2049 Week got underway. World Liberty Financial selected ZIG Finance to put its USD1 stablecoin to work across real-world investment opportunities.
The structure is straightforward. ZIG Markets originates, structures and distributes the deals, while USD1 serves as the settlement and treasury layer underneath. The first yield-bearing vault is already live, which sets this apart from the roadmap announcements that usually dominate conference weeks.
The scale is what makes it notable. USD1 entered TOKEN2049 week with about $4.47 billion in supply, placing it among the largest dollar stablecoins in the market. ZIG Finance, by comparison, carries a market capitalization of roughly $80 million. A major issuer choosing a focused infrastructure partner signals that execution now matters more than size: getting stablecoin liquidity out of wallets and into productive, verifiable onchain flows.
For an industry that has spent years talking about real-world assets, this is what it looks like when the talk becomes a product.
Best Payments Push: USD1 Goes to Merchants
World Liberty had a busy week. On stage on 7 October, CEO Zach Witkoff and co-founder Zak Folkman joined Mesh CEO Bam Azizi to announce a partnership that will make USD1 spendable at millions of merchants worldwide, with rollout planned for this quarter. Folkman added that the same technology will extend to some of the largest Web2 businesses.
Witkoff also addressed issuance. Following conditional OCC approval in August for a national trust bank, World Liberty expects to issue USD1 directly rather than through BitGo. Taken together with the ZIG Finance deal, the picture is a stablecoin building both sides of the market: yield on one end, everyday spending on the other.
Best Infrastructure Milestone: Coinbase Global Exchange
Coinbase confirmed it had completed its integration of Deribit, forming Coinbase Global Exchange. It was one of the few headline items that arrived as a working product rather than a promise.
Biggest Organizer News: TOKEN2049 Goes to New York
TOKEN2049 announced its first US edition, in New York on 16 and 17 June 2027, targeting 15,000 attendees. Alongside Dubai in April and Singapore in October, the series will run three flagship events a year for the first time.
Defining Theme: Payments Over Trading
Day two belonged to the institutions, with traditional finance and crypto leaders sharing stages on tokenized assets, onchain settlement and round-the-clock markets. The new TOKEN2049 Institutional gathering brought 250 senior leaders into one room. On the floor, payment providers described concrete plans for stablecoin cross-border transfers, merchant settlement and treasury management. One lesson echoed across meetings: a license gets you in the door, but connecting with regulated counterparties is what actually moves money.
Boldest Calls
The stage had its share of conviction. Tom Lee argued the market is moving from crypto spring into a full bull market, Arthur Hayes promoted FLOP, an AI-agent token with an airdrop planned for the fourth quarter, and Murad Mahmudov made the case that community-driven memecoins could outperform.
The Takeaway
TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026 was less about new tokens and more about new rails. The standout deals, led by ZIG Finance and World Liberty Financial, showed stablecoins graduating from parked capital to working capital. Next stop: New York.
