ETHDenver has always been a place where the industry takes its own temperature. This year, we arrived with a clear intention: not to broadcast, but to convene. Here’s a quick recap.
War room: a tactical guide on how a team prepares for launch
With Ellie Davidson (Espresso), Bruno Faviero (Magna) and Corinne Struck (Kraken 360), hosted by Munam Wasi of the Ink Foundation
The morning began with a live announcement: Payward has acquired Magna, and Magna will be deeply integrated into Kraken. This immediately set the tone for the session. This was not a theoretical panel on token launches. The conversation opened by exploring what this type of onboarding actually changes for teams preparing to go live, and what exactly stays the same.
From there, the panel looked at the decisions that define a launch before it happens. The first was strategic clarity: When you sit down to plan a launch, what two or three outcomes are you actually optimizing for and what are you explicitly doing? not optimize for ? Trying to win in all dimensions at once is how you end up with a technically operational but strategically incoherent launch.
When it came to token design, the question the panel kept coming back to was deceptively simple: Who is this token for and how do they get it? A token that rewards bad behavior at launch doesn’t just create a short-term problem. This builds bad incentives into the network from day one, and it’s difficult to eliminate them. The discussion focused on how you design distribution to reward the right people, and how you recognize and avoid patterns that produce a launch spike followed by a slow purge.
The operational side of launch preparation also had its own moment. What systems and routines are essential in the weeks leading up to go live, so you don’t make critical decisions on the fly? The panel was candid about where teams tend to feel the toughest trade-offs: moving quickly or remaining flexible, and both or protecting the long-term health of the network.
The session ended with a question that every founder in the room needed to hear: what should you decide sooner and what should you stop overthinking? The answers were practical and straightforward, and the common thread was that most teams spent too much time deliberating over which items were salvageable and not enough time over which were not.
An unsurprising development: the decisions that delay the launch
Featuring Katya Ternopolska (Sentora), Val Gui (xStocks), Colton Conley (Arrington Capital) and Matt Immerso (Blockchange Ventures), hosted by Nick Santomauro of Kraken
If the War Room panel was about preparing for launch, this one was about what happens afterward, when the harder work of staying alive begins.
The panel opened with a question that reframes the way most teams think about growth: What does “ready to grow” actually mean? Not ready to announce, not ready to demo, but ready to handle 10x more business without the wheels coming off. The conversation focused on which signal you actually trust when you make that call, and which signals look good but can be misleading.
From there, the discussion turned to which decisions paid off over time, which ones continued to get worse as projects developed. The models that emerged weren’t the most flashy. These were boring infrastructure choices: ones that made later integrations easier, reduced fire drills, and meant that when things went wrong (and they did), teams weren’t starting from scratch. The theme of “the boring decision that later saved us” recurs in almost every example.
The investor perspective added a useful layer. Across portfolios, the most common early upgrades that facilitate growth tend to cluster around a few areas: clear ownership and escalation paths, dashboards that tell you what’s really happening (not just what you hope for), compliance and security hygiene that avoids painful rewrites, and an early hire or two that changes a team’s ability to scale. These things seem like overhead until they’re suddenly the only thing keeping you from having a really bad week.
The conversation about distribution was particularly lively. Moving from early adopters to a real audience exposes all the assumptions you’ve made around onboarding, UX, and partner readiness. Platform constraints, custody, compliance, regional access: these are not problems you can solve reactively at scale. Teams that manage growth well are usually those that have an owner responsible for each of these issues before volume arrives, not after.
The session ended the same way as the War Room: what should you decide sooner and what should you stop overthinking? After a full pattern recognition panel, the answers came in with a little more weight.
Launch in 2026: what still matters when the cycle reverses
With Stephen McKeon (Collab & Currency), Maria Shen (Electric Capital), Mason Nystrom (Pantera Capital) and Rob Schmultz (Blockchange Ventures), moderated by Calvin Leyon, Head of Onchain at Kraken.
The final panel looked back to the longest time horizon of the day. The conversation moved away from tactical execution and toward a larger question: What do investors really believe in 2026, and how does that shape what they fund?
The panel began with what investors are actually buying into when they back a team today. The bar has changed since 2021. There’s now a whole category of “good stories that don’t stand up to scrutiny,” and the discussion was honest about what the table stakes look like today versus yesterday, and which common founder narratives tend to collapse when you press them.
From there, the conversation turned to fundamentals: When the market mood changes, what actually predicts which projects will endure and which will disappear? The clearest signal isn’t what a team does when things are exciting. That’s what they do when they’re not. This is where you see if a product has real traction or just narrative momentum. The panel also explored which cyclical tactics tend to age poorly and why.
The long-term conversation about the thesis was one of the most candid parts of the day. Each investor was pushed to express something they believe in, not a narrative, but a structural change in user behavior or market infrastructure that they see as inevitable over a 5-10 year horizon. The “why now in 2026, not 2021” has been a useful corrective to the tendency to recycle old theses with updated branding.
The panel concluded with how all of this manifests in practice: how theses shape diligence, what investors actually do once they arrive (hiring, partnerships, governance, compliance readiness), and how launch structures have matured since the 2021 era. Less spraying and praying, more sequencing. Fewer surprises, clearer expectations, better readiness checks.
The final question, what is one thing every founder should ask a potential investor, produced some of the best answers of the day. The consensus: Ask them how they behave when things are difficult, not when things are exciting. Anyone can be a good partner in a bull market.
Three panels, one crossing
Three different entry points towards the same underlying question: how to build something that lasts?
What struck us in all three conversations was the consistency of the responses. It’s not a secret and it’s not cycle specific. It’s the same discipline that has always separated successful teams from those that don’t: clarity about what you’re building, honesty about what you’re not ready for, and a willingness to make boring decisions early so they don’t become crises later.
We were proud to host these conversations at ETHDenver with the Ink Foundation, and even more proud to have people on our team who can have them.
We’ll see you next time.
