Op-Ed · Blockchain Week – UNGA Edition 2026

The Rules Are Being Written Without the People Who Build. That Has to Change.

On the opening morning of Blockchain Week – UNGA Edition, builders, lawyers, technologists and a former government policymaker made the same argument from different directions: trust can’t be decreed from the top. It has to be earned in the open.

The day before we opened the doors at Gallery MC on September 16, the Senate’s cloture vote on the Clarity Act fell short. For a room full of people who have spent years asking Washington for clear rules, that could have set a grim tone. It didn’t. What followed was one of the most substantive mornings I’ve seen in fifteen years of producing these events, and I think policymakers in Washington should watch it.

Day 1 Opening Session, September 16, 2026, Gallery MC, New York. Watch or download on the Internet Archive

Karla Ballard of HUMN opened by reminding everyone why we started this week in the first place. When world leaders gather in New York for the General Assembly, the people building the next financial system deserve a room where they can speak, too. That’s still the point.

I.Liberty starts with choice

The first panel took on liberty and privacy, and Rajiv Jadhav framed it better than I could: liberty is choice, and choice only exists once basic needs are met. Jesse Darnell of Block Reign brought it down to earth with his work in the Philippines, where he said the government has already put its entire budget on chain and is now wrestling with a question every government will face: how much transparency do citizens get, and how much control does the state keep? There’s no clean answer, but it’s the right question, and it’s being asked by people doing the work.

II.Who actually writes the rules

Then Samuel Jacques-Cloutier, who spent seven years drafting financial legislation for the Cayman Islands, including its virtual asset framework, gave a talk every member of Congress should see. His argument: much of what Americans assume is domestic financial regulation is actually shaped by the Financial Action Task Force, where about forty member jurisdictions set standards that well over a hundred more must adopt or risk being cut off from the global dollar system. Since 2013, he said, the standards have been amended twenty-two times, and seventeen of those amendments added requirements. The system measures how well countries implement the rules, he argued, not whether the rules catch criminals.

His most memorable example came from his own experience in government. Nineteen analysts were implementing compliance standards. One person worked digital forensics, actually catching criminals, and that one person recovered millions. Flip that ratio, he said, and you’d catch far more bad actors while respecting due process. That’s not an anti-regulation argument. It’s an argument for regulation that works.

III.Keeping humans in charge of the machines

The oversight panel, with Dr. Siegfried Isele, Irina Kanaeva, Gabriela Ivancu and Srinivasa Rao Gunda, turned to AI. Gabriela offered a simple test for human oversight that I’d like to see written into every AI policy: does the human have the authority to stop an automated decision, the capability to understand it, and the time to act before the harm lands? If any one of those is missing, the oversight is a checkbox.

Alex Lightman then delivered our keynote, Survivability in the Age of AI. He asked the room for its “P(doom),” the odds that AI wipes us out, then challenged us to ask a better question: what is our probability of survival, and what are we doing each day to raise it? His case for building a relationship with advanced AI based on rights, obligations and a public evidence trail on the blockchain, rather than control alone, will provoke disagreement. It should. These are the debates the UN will eventually have to hold.

IV.Writing rules without killing the signal

The panel I most want Washington to hear brought together Hugh Dugan, who spent twenty-six years at the United Nations, Congressman Dorian Jakov Štern Vukotić of Liberland and Olubunmi Fabanwo, moderated by Cat Bonar of Block Reign.

Olubunmi described what happened when Nigeria’s central bank banned crypto activity. It didn’t stop. Peer-to-peer trading surged, and she said Nigeria remains among the top five countries for crypto use. Meanwhile, by her account, roughly ninety percent of wallets for the government’s own digital currency, the eNaira, sit unused while about twenty-six million Nigerians use stablecoin rails. Her point was simple: rule writers assume people have an alternative. For millions facing hyperinflation, crypto is the alternative.

Hugh called for moving beyond proof of work and proof of stake to what he called proof of trust. Cat shared that when her former firm received SEC complaints, documented compliance training and policies got six pages removed from the complaint. Clarity from Congress would help, but builders who document, train and protect users don’t have to wait for it.

V.Data is the next asset class

Jimmy Nguyen closed the morning with a keynote on data as an asset. Most enterprise data, he noted, is unstructured, and the public data AI models train on could be largely exhausted within a few years. That makes the vast body of unpublished research and private data sets enormously valuable, and blockchain tokens can verify who owns a data set, control who can access it and route payments back to its creators.

VI.What Washington should take from this

Not one speaker that morning asked for no rules.

They asked for rules written by people who understand the technology, tested against whether they actually work, and accountable to the people who live under them. The Clarity Act will come back in some form. When it does, the voices in this video should be part of the conversation.

Blockchain Week – UNGA Edition is an independent event and is not affiliated with the United Nations. Learn more at blockchainweek.ai.