Miami Herbert Business School hosted the fourth annual Business of Blockchain and Tokenization Conference this spring, drawing researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry professionals for two days of sessions on agentic commerce, tokenization, stablecoin regulation, and the growing convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence.
Ola Henfridsson, professor of business technology and associate dean of online business programs at Miami Herbert, who founded and co-chairs the conference with Roman Beck of Bentley University, said the deliberate balance between academic research and industry participation is what defines it.
“It’s really a meeting point for both professionals and researchers,” Henfridsson said. “There are professionals who want to understand what’s going on under the hood and researchers who want to engage with the business frontier.
“That mix reflects Miami’s own standing in the space. Some of the biggest founders live here. Miami is really at the heart of the development of tokenization and blockchain.”
This year’s keynotes reflected the conference’s dual identity. William Quigley, a co-founder of Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization and an early PayPal investor, spoke about what he called “deep insight,” the kind of profound, below-the-surface understanding of emerging technology that separates entrepreneurs who build lasting companies from those who chase trends. Ram Gopal, director of the Gillmore Centre for Financial Technology at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, offered a perspective on how the industry is developing in the United Kingdom and beyond. Hanna Halaburda of NYU Stern, an economist who has written about Bitcoin since the early days, delivered the third keynote, appearing for the second time at the conference.
The conference drew approximately 80 attendees this year, a size Henfridsson considers an asset. “With 80 people, you have access you simply wouldn’t get elsewhere,” he said. “That can be genuinely important.”
Research and panel presentations covered topics such as tokenization, stablecoin regulation, and the implications of the recently passed Genius Act for the dollar’s standing as a global reserve currency. A session from Amazon Web Services on x402, an emerging open protocol for agent-to-agent payments, addressed what Henfridsson sees as one of the field’s most consequential near-term questions. “If we’re going to have agents that are going to do things for us, act on our behalf, those agents will have wallets,” he said. “And those wallets will be crypto wallets.”
That convergence of blockchain and AI ran through both days. Henfridsson sees the two as complementary: AI is powerful but inherently uncertain, while blockchain is built on fixed, verifiable records. “We need both,” he said.
The presenting sponsor of the conference was Relm Insurance, a firm specializing in crypto-risk underwriting. Its CEO and co-founder, Joseph Ziolkowski, opened the conference and joined the panel on entrepreneurship in the blockchain space, where he discussed underwriting risks the traditional insurance industry has been unwilling or unable to cover, from staking and slashing events to smart-contract failure. Flare Network, a blockchain venture focused on data infrastructure, was also a sponsor.
The conference will return for a fifth year in 2027 as regulatory frameworks take shape and established financial institutions move deeper into digital assets. “Good regulation of stablecoins will really help the dollar,” Henfridsson said. “It has huge implications for the banking sector. These are not small discussions.”
