Remy Blaire: Welcome to FINTECH.TV. Well, joining us from Money20/20 is Amira Valliani, who’s the head of payments growth at the Solana Foundation. Amira, a great time of year. Thank you so much for joining me.
Amira Valliani: Thanks for having me. This is really fun. We’re just talking robots.
Remy Blaire: Yeah, absolutely. So behind us there’s a humanoid robot, and we are counting down to Breakpoint 2026 taking place in London. So this is an exciting time of year. What can we look forward to?
Amira Valliani: Well, first off, there will be other robots, so you can see those. But more importantly, Breakpoint is the flagship conference at Solana. So you can expect 6,000 builders, developers and investors from over 100 countries all descending on London to talk about and understand what the future of the intersection between finance and technology looks like, and what it looks like to build a really incredible internet capital market.
Remy Blaire: And of course, as we count down to the event taking place in London, we’re curious about the speakers as well as the theme. So give us a sneak peek.
Amira Valliani: Breakpoint, I think, is [unclear: “the only word”], and the only place in the world where you can see a member of the House of Lords on the same stage as Balaji Srinivasan, the founder of the network state. So you can truly expect the spectrum. We have the CEO of MoneyGram coming to stage. We have the CEO of [unclear: “Alphonse”], the CEO of FOMO, the biggest finance app on the iTunes store right now. And then you can expect everyone from places like Bank of New York Mellon, Western Union, SoFi, Ramp, all these major names talking about what the future of finance and technology looks like.
So it’s going to be a really fun time. We also have a little bit of London flavor. We have the former coach of Liverpool, or the former manager of Liverpool, who’s going to be coming to join us on stage. You have folks who are pretty senior in UK government coming to be with us. And then you will have everything from what’s happening on stage to the actual [unclear: “field”].
At Breakpoint, we’re recreating London in Olympia, which is a giant convention center in London. There’s a pub. You’ll get a little Chelsea flavor if you’re a Chelsea fan. Think about football. Watch the games. You can see a lot of robots, see what’s happening with the future of AI. It really is an incredible time.
Remy Blaire: And I’m sure the Solana team is busy and hard at work planning for Breakpoint 2026. So tell us a little bit about the themes that we can expect and some of the conversations, as well as some of the panel discussions we can expect.
Amira Valliani: So the theme of Breakpoint this year is Token Supercycle. Well, there’s this massive effort around tokenization, and [unclear: “this happens both on change the way we talk about it”]. But increasingly, you’re seeing tokens in sort of public discourse around AI-related tokens. Right? Tokenizer, token, LLMs. Our belief is it’s tokens all the way down. Anything that is an asset is going to become machine-readable, and that’s going to make up the entire internet capital market. And Breakpoint is really an exploration of what that market is going to look like.
So it’s two days of content. I like to loosely think of day one as [unclear: “boomer assets”] and day two as [unclear: “assets”]. But really, day one is what is actually tokenized today. So [unclear: “all the assets that you probably have access to a third of”], things like money market funds, private credit, equities, and how these are made available on chain. And day two is what are the assets of the future, what are things that people are thinking about and what that looks like. So things like compute, prediction markets, luxury goods, and figuring out how to make them more easily accessible on chain so anybody can buy, sell and trade them. Talent. How do you think about tokenizing things like venture capital funds, so that everyone can benefit from some of the gains of these bigger investments?
And so Breakpoint will really take you on a tour of all these different assets and what the future looks like, being able to bring technology to bear in making these assets available more broadly using Solana.
Remy Blaire: Amira, I understand that Breakpoint is near and dear to your heart. So tell us a little bit about the why.
Amira Valliani: So I am now about to hit my five-year mark in the Solana ecosystem, which is astounding to think about. And the way that I got involved was really coming to Breakpoint on a whim at the very first Breakpoint in Portugal in 2021. I wasn’t going to go, but I was really curious about the message around blockchain being a tool to build a more financially inclusive ecosystem. And so I said, let me go check this out. I had some friends [unclear: “revolving”] the ecosystem that told me I should go try this. So I bought a ticket on a whim, found some cheap hotel in Lisbon and checked out the first Breakpoint. And I was hooked immediately. The energy, the excitement, people being really excited about what the future of finance actually looks like, and the future of tech, just drew me in.
And now, five years later, I’m [unclear: “up in clay on the damn thing”]. So it’s really an incredible trajectory. I think it shows two things. One is it is a really inclusive environment. You can show up not knowing anyone, and if you’re looking for your community, you can really find it. It’s a big enough conference where there’s something for everyone, but it’s [unclear: “not enough conference”] where you can’t really feel like you can find your people.
And [unclear: “the vibe to this really work is”] the second thing, in terms of inclusivity, the energy is really high. And the thing that really gets people to come from a hundred different countries to Breakpoint year after year is just how fun it is. And that’s why you have everyone from two people hacking away on a laptop to institutions like JPMorgan and SoFi coming into the room. The way I think about it is it’s like Comic-Con meets Davos. It’s really about the future of how these things work. And it’s sophisticated in terms of discussions about the future of technology and the future of finance, but also silly and fun and warm, and all the things that make it a place that you want to spend time.
Remy Blaire: Well, finally, before I let you go, we are here on the ground in Las Vegas wrapping up Money20/20, and there are a lot of themes that all of us have been paying attention to on the ground. So what are the most important takeaways for you at Money20/20?
Amira Valliani: I think what’s really astounding about Money20/20 is that over the years, it’s become much more of a place where you hear about things like stablecoins and the role of blockchain in the future of how money works. It used to be, not that long ago, that saying something like “stablecoin” or saying the word “crypto,” we were kind of persona non grata. You kind of didn’t feel like you belonged. Maybe you were in a corner. Now you look around, you see the word “stablecoin” everywhere.
And I think it’s really apparent that bigger companies, the people who are giants that move money around the world, are really starting to see the [unclear: “value crop”] of what it looks like to build on chain: faster, cheaper settlement. But also the industry. Crypto has risen to the moment. I think they’ve become much more sophisticated, much more thoughtful about the concerns that larger institutions in finance and money have, and taking those into account. And you see that in the sophistication of the product and the new offerings, how they’re building packages that can serve companies like Western Union, and what it means to deliver value for their customers and build just a bigger, more inclusive engine of the system.
Remy Blaire: Well, Amira, it’s so great talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us as we count down to Breakpoint 2026 in London.
Amira Valliani: Thank you for having me.
