Ripple names 75+ speakers for Swell 2026, expects 1,500+

Ripple named more than 75 speakers for Swell 2026 and expects over 1,500 attendees. The conference will take place in New York from Oct. 27 to 29 and will bring together financial firms, crypto platforms and developers.

The program runs across three stages with more than 50 sessions organized into institutional, ecosystem and technical tracks. For the first time, the developer-focused XRPL Apex will operate alongside Swell as a single event. A hackathon is scheduled for Oct. 24-25 before the main conference. The core program and expo will be held at the Shed in Manhattan, with a closing celebration on Oct. 29.

New additions to the speaker roster include Johann Kerbrat, senior vice president and general manager of crypto at Robinhood; Laide Majiyagbe, global head of markets at BNY; and Michael Blaugrund, vice president of strategic initiatives at Intercontinental Exchange. Ripple executives Brad Garlinghouse and Monica Long are also listed to appear.

Other confirmed participants include Matt Damon, co-founder of Water.org; Tom Farley, chairman and CEO of Bullish; former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan; Tradeweb CEO Billy Hult; and XRP Ledger CTO emeritus David Schwartz. Representatives from Tradeweb, PwC, State Street, Amazon Web Services, Canary Capital and the XRP Ledger Foundation, along with academic contributors, are on the agenda.

Session topics will cover payments, capital markets, exchange-traded funds, stablecoins, tokenization, treasury management, cybersecurity, compliance and the utility of XRP. Panels will address privacy, quantum computing, decentralized finance and agentic finance, a term used here to describe AI-driven systems that perform defined financial tasks under set controls.

Technical sessions and the hackathon will center on the XRP Ledger’s consensus mechanism and transaction infrastructure. The ledger uses a network of validators rather than proof-of-work mining, typically settles transactions in seconds and supports issued assets, a decentralized exchange, tokenization and cross-border transfers.

Regulatory developments in New York are expected to feature in discussions. On July 7 the New York State Department of Financial Services proposed rules for payment stablecoin issuers that outline supervisory requirements for tokens intended for payment and settlement. Ripple described the 2026 program as its largest Swell to date and linked the tenth anniversary to rising institutional engagement with regulated digital asset infrastructure, tokenization and interoperability.