Buenos Aires has its own unique atmosphere. It is a city where European elegance meets Latin American intensity – a place where economic theory is not just an abstract concept pondered in ivory towers, but a daily, concrete struggle for survival. It is no coincidence that this metropolis was chosen to host Devconnect 2025. Argentina, a country known for its economic instability and grassroots adoption of cryptocurrencies, provided the perfect backdrop for the tech industry's growth towards maturity.
The previous years in the crypto cycle resembled the glitz, noise, and speculative mania of Las Vegas casinos. However, Buenos Aires offered a strong and clear counterpoint. There was no scent of 'easy money' or vaporware projects in the air – there was the smell of strong coffee and serious engineering. Here, the narrative shifted. No longer were toys being built for the bored and wealthy, but infrastructure was being developed for a world that is creaking at its seams.
To understand this significant change, we sought insights from key industry players: Arthur Firstov (Mercuryo CBO) focused on the demand for privacy, Vivien Lin (BingX CPO) described the integration of AI into trading environments, and Ivan Machena (8lends CCO) provided important perspectives on the adoption of layer-2 technologies.
Through diverse background discussions with these industry leaders, a clear picture formed. We are transitioning into a new era. This is a story of how privacy became a requirement, how AI claims its place in finance, and how global diversity shattered the myth of the “archetypical user” once and for all.
The demand for privacy, from feature to foundational pillar
The main message from Buenos Aires was not conveyed through fireworks or celebrities. It was whispered amidst the hustle of technical workshops and packed hacker houses. The message was simple: transparency is a feature, but total exposure is a flaw.
In previous gatherings in Bangkok, privacy was just a 'track', one side room visited by cypherpunks and idealists. In Buenos Aires, it became the main program. The industry has collectively understood that without privacy, there is no widespread adoption – only mass surveillance.
Arthur Firstov, the Business Director of Mercuryo, aptly described this shift. He noted that there was a clear directional change in the research topics of the event.
“Privacy was the core theme of the event,” Firstov emphasizes, and continues:
“In Bangkok, privacy was just one significant aspect, but Buenos Aires elevated it to the main stage.”
His observation reflects the atmosphere that permeated the entire conference. In workspaces and lecture halls, a phrase began to circulate that became an unofficial slogan for Devconnect 2025:
“If your wallet is not designed to protect privacy, it is already outdated.”
This is not a momentary technology trend, but a reaction to an increasingly open world where economic data is used as a weapon. Firstov highlights that the direction was set from the outset when Vitalik Buterin went through his own personal privacy palette from operating systems and mobile devices to private RPC connections.
Critical development is particularly evident in how this technology is now offered. It is no longer about the command line costs of a few, but about invisibility.
Firstov explains:
“Builders focused on stealth addresses, smart AA patterns [Account Abstraction], selective data sharing, and creating better assumptions – users no longer need to notice how much complexity the system handles in the background.”
This “invisibility” is the famous holy grail. The user does not want to understand zero-knowledge proofs – they just want to know that their bank balance is not public information.
Alongside privacy, Firstov also identified practical development in the DeFi sector: “the emergence of pre-confirmations for instant-feeling stablecoin payments” and new yield opportunities that offer “simple, money-market-like experiences without full-risk gambling.” The trend is moving the industry away from 10,000% APY Ponzi lures towards a boring but reliable and private economy.
The Black Box controversy, who can we trust?
No revolution is without internal contradictions. While the need for privacy was undeniable, the way to achieve it sparked the week's most heated technical debates. At the center of the disputes were Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), or hardware-based secure environments.
Does the future of privacy lie in cryptographic math or chip manufacturing?
Firstov describes this divide as “the event's most unexpected and controversial technical debate.” On one side were practical builders. He mentions:
“Part of the camp argued that TEEs are practically essential for executing high-capacity, low-latency, private computation tasks – especially in private settlements, derivatives strategies, and agent-based execution.”
The reasoning is compelling: if we want Wall Street speeds on blockchain, mere math may be too slow. We need hardware acceleration.
However, the opposition was loud, principled, and very skeptical. Firstov relays their warnings: “If the model of trust is ‘trust this black-box server in a data center’, the development of crypto doesn’t really differ from traditional finance.”
If the bank's server is simply swapped for an Intel SGX environment, have we really decentralized anything?
This led to an unresolved meta-question that is likely to guide research for a long time to come:
“How much of the world's stablecoins and payment prices are we willing to run on opaque hardware... and what does ‘sufficiently trust-minimized’ actually mean in this context?”
The rise of machines: AI as the new economic architect
While cryptographers debated hardware trust, another major factor began to quietly integrate into the crypto stack: AI. Devconnect 2025 did not deal with just the ledger – it discussed the inevitable union of decentralized databases and autonomous 'brains'.
Vivien Lin, Chief Product Officer and head of BingX Labs, brought a perspective from the frontlines of centralized exchanges (CEX), where development is rapidly making them much more complex systems. The clearest theme for her was evident.
Lin states:
“A central theme for me was the integration of AI into the infrastructure of exchanges and the realization that exchanges are evolving into full-fledged financial ecosystems, not just trading applications.”
He describes a future where AI acts as a unifying force in finance.
“Builders focused on how AI can unite trading, storage, payments, risk management, and user intelligence into one ‘super-application experience.’”
However, just as in the TEE discussions in the realm of privacy protection, the integration of AI brings with it the paradox of security. How can we trust AI with our life savings? Lin notes a strong push towards “secure, verifiable systems, including privacy-preserving computation and on-chain verification, which ensure that AI-powered features do not jeopardize user data or the security of assets.”
The goal is to build ecosystems that are “both smart and highly secure, giving users more automation and context without compromising trust.” However, according to Lin, the most interesting friction point was not related to capability, but to autonomy.
“The biggest friction point related to how much autonomy AI agents should have in trading environments,” Lin clarifies. The discussion divided participants into two camps.
He adds:
“Some developers saw agents should manage liquidity, balance portfolios, or execute orders without human oversight. Others warned that unrestricted access to the execution layer could introduce systemic risk.”
The central disagreement revolves around the role of humans in the markets: “Should AI act as a parallel guide to traders or as a fully independent actor in the market structure?” In Buenos Aires, the consensus seemed to shift towards autonomy, provided the safeguards brought by cryptography are strong enough.
Geography is destiny, lessons from the global south
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Devconnect 2025 was the event venue itself. Hosting the event in Argentina forced the global developer community to think practically. While developers in Silicon Valley focus on optimizing code to the millisecond, the population of Buenos Aires contemplates preserving the value of their labor against inflation.
Arthur Firstov observed how this radical diversity changed the conversation from theoretical scaling to survival tools. “Devconnect brought completely different user priorities into the same room,” he says.
“Latin American teams highlighted everyday use cases, such as ‘wallets on affordable smartphones’ and rent or salary payments in stablecoins,” Firstov notes and continues:
“Compare this to Asian and U.S. infrastructure teams that still focused on ‘continuous futures, routing, MEV phenomena, and latency.’”
This collision of worlds led to a synthesis. The conversation shifted from simple 'Transactions Per Second' (TPS) comparisons toward usability and practical implementations. Firstov now lists the essential questions:
“How can smart wallets hide complexity so that the user's experience feels like a regular fintech app? How to support both ‘high-frequency trading’ flows and monthly salary payments without compromising trust or security?”
The biggest realization? “There is no typical user in crypto.”
Vivien Lin agrees with the sentiment and states that Argentina's presence brought groundedness to the technical discussions.
“The diversity of developers, particularly strong Argentinian representation, shifted the conversation towards concrete adoption challenges, not just theoretical scaling.”
Argentinian builders did not want to discuss the philosophy of money; they wanted to solve immediate problems.
Lin explains:
“Argentinian builders raised issues of inflation, capital controls, and the need for rapid settlement platforms that operate reliably in unstable economies.”
This expanded the understanding of the role of exchanges, emphasizing the necessity of “AI-powered ecosystems that address both local constraints and broader challenges, such as regulatory fragmentation, cross-border liquidity, and mobile-first adoption.”
What is actually being built? Infrastructure surpasses the hype
Putting philosophy and geography aside, one might ask: where are builders actually taking their code?
Ivan Machena, the Chief Communications Officer of 8lends, offers a realistic perspective. The “ghost chain” era, where blockchains have high value but few users, is coming to an end. Now the focus is on ecosystems that support real products.
“Following the broader discussion in the industry around Devconnect,” Machena notes, “several layer-2 and application-level projects continue to attract a significant number of developers.”
On the consumer side, Machena mentions the Base platform. It is seen as an example of “rapid growth and a smooth onboarding interface,” and has become a gateway for private investors. In the DeFi space, Arbitrum maintains its position as “the most popular alternative due to its mature ecosystem and composability,” while Polygon remains popular for teams seeking balance.
However, Machena notes a shift towards more technically advanced options.
“Growing interest is also directed towards zk-based solutions, such as zkSync and StarkNet, especially from teams building more technically demanding or long-term products. The trend is clear: discussions at Devconnect emphasize L2 solutions that already support real products, not just experimental concepts.”
Arthur Firstov adds yet another layer to this adoption map, referring to the privacy- and agent-oriented sector. He identifies the Aztec platform as “sparking serious interest as a privacy-focused environment where products can be private by default, but selectively transparent as needed.”
Especially, Firstov emphasizes the Privacy Pools solution, which acts as a bridge between cypherpunk ethics and institutional reality. It emerged as a “regulatory-aware solution... a practical answer to what privacy looks like when regulators and significant capital must accept it.”
Furthermore, the physical world is being brought on-chain. Firstov notes a trend where teams are building DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks)-style storage and computing services that are paid for with stablecoins, “aiming to make crypto feel like traditional cloud service APIs.”
Outlook 2026: from casino to cathedral
As the participants of Devconnect 2025 dispersed from Buenos Aires to their homes around the world, the atmosphere had clearly shifted. The industry is maturing. The culture of the event – small, technical, and community-driven gatherings instead of large marketing spectacles – is shaping the narrative for the coming year.
Arthur Firstov predicts that the storyteller of crypto narratives will fundamentally change:
“The stories of 2026 can be expected to reflect this change: ‘the infrastructure story instead of the casino stories’, ‘stablecoins as the interface for crypto’, and privacy as a given.”
Now, in this vision, cryptocurrency no longer means gambling, but is becoming the invisible and reliable foundation of the global financial system. Conversations no longer revolve around the prices of tokens. In Firstov's words, the growing question is: “What Web2–Web3 integrations are truly being brought to market and attracting real users?”
Vivien Lin agrees and sees a future in ecosystems that are interconnected, not in separate closed systems.
“It reinforced the understanding that the future of crypto trading is based on ecosystems. This thinking is steering the industry towards interoperable, AI-driven trading ecosystems, where liquidity, identity, execution, and strategy automation are increasingly intertwined as we move towards 2026.”
Buenos Aires served as a stress test for the soul of crypto. The industry emerged not by providing simple answers, but by finally asking the right, difficult questions. We leave with fewer illusions, but with better tools. The 'casino narrative' is over; the 'infrastructure narrative' has begun. For the first time in a long while, it feels like we are building something sustainable.
