But success creates blind spots.

The 2026 European Financial Congress, one of Poland’s most important annual gatherings of bankers, regulators, consultants and financial-sector executives, is a useful case study. I reviewed its programme not by looking at personalities, sponsors or institutional politics, but by asking a simpler question: how much time does the agenda allocate to different parts of the financial system?

The answer is revealing. The European Financial Congress is, in practice, much more a banking and regulatory congress than a congress about finance as a whole.

The audit

My method was deliberately simple. I classified sessions in the publicly available EKF 2026 programme into broad categories and counted the number of minutes allocated to each. Parallel sessions were counted separately because the purpose was not to reconstruct a participant’s possible individual path through the event, but to measure the weight assigned to each topic by the programme itself.

This is not a perfect scientific classification. Some panels naturally overlap across categories: AI in banks, regulatory risk, macroeconomic security, capital markets, public policy. But even with this caveat, the structure of the programme is clear.

In my working classification, broadly defined banking topics — banking, bank-tech, regulation, legal and operational risk, bank business models and financial-sector resilience — account for roughly 45% of the identified session time.

Cryptoassets and stablecoins account for about 60 minutes, or less than 2% of the programme.

That would already be notable. What makes it more interesting is the framing of that one session.

The only clearly visible session in this area is titled:

“Programmable money: will banks lose ground to stablecoins and digital wallets?”

The question is not: how is the architecture of finance changing? It is not: what does tokenisation mean for capital markets, payments, custody, supervision or monetary sovereignty? It is not: how should Poland position itself in the emerging on-chain financial infrastructure?

The question is: will banks lose ground?

That framing matters.

This is not really a session about crypto

The EKF session is not about the full cryptoasset market. It is not about Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, tokenised financial instruments, on-chain settlement, custody infrastructure, cryptoasset service providers under MiCA, market abuse, exchange supervision, wallet infrastructure, or the changing structure of digital capital markets.

It is mainly about programmable money, tokenised deposits, CBDCs and euro stablecoins — and even there, the central perspective is the banking sector.

This is not irrelevant. On the contrary, stablecoins, tokenised deposits and CBDCs are important topics. But they represent only a narrow part of the broader digital-asset ecosystem. A conference that devotes one hour to this topic, and frames it mostly through the question of whether banks can preserve their position, is not really mapping the future of finance. It is mapping how incumbent institutions perceive a threat.

This is the distinction that matters.

The numbers are not large enough to justify hype, but they are large enough to justify attention

Cryptoassets are not larger than banks, insurers or investment funds. They do not yet dominate the financial system. They are volatile, unevenly regulated, technically complex and still associated with major fraud, operational failures and speculative excess.

But they are not marginal either.

At the time of writing, the global cryptoasset market capitalisation is around USD 2.6 trillion. Stablecoins alone account for more than USD 300 billion. Euro-denominated stablecoins remain tiny — roughly 0.3% of the global stablecoin market — but this is precisely why the topic is strategically important for Europe.

The issue is not only current size. The issue is infrastructure.

Stablecoins are not just another speculative token category. They are used as settlement assets in crypto markets, as liquidity instruments, as payment rails, and increasingly as a bridge between traditional finance and blockchain-based systems. Tokenised deposits, e-money tokens and CBDCs are different institutional answers to the same underlying question: who will issue, control and settle digital money in programmable financial networks?

That is not a niche question. It goes to the future of payments, treasury management, cross-border settlement, custody, financial supervision and monetary sovereignty.

Poland’s domestic context makes the silence even stranger

Poland is not a country where crypto is irrelevant.

A recent conservative estimate based on a CBOS survey commissioned by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna suggested that about 2 million adult Poles currently hold cryptocurrencies or related assets, with roughly PLN 40 billion (c. €10b) invested. Industry estimates are higher, though they should be treated with more caution.

Even the conservative numbers are enough to make crypto a mainstream household-finance issue, not a fringe hobby.

At the same time, Poland has spent recent months debating how to implement and enforce the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. MiCA is already the central regulatory framework for cryptoassets in the European Union. Its stablecoin provisions have applied since June 2024, and the broader framework, including cryptoasset service providers, has applied since December 2024, subject to national transitional arrangements.

Poland has also been dealing with the consequences of a major crypto-exchange scandal involving Zondacrypto. Prosecutors have investigated suspected fraud and money laundering, with reported losses of at least PLN 350 million and thousands of affected clients. Whether the final losses prove higher is for investigators and courts to establish, but the case has already been large enough to become a public-policy issue.

In other words, crypto is not absent from Poland. It is absent from the mainstream financial conversation.

That is a very different diagnosis.

The Polish success trap

Polish banking modernised early and successfully. That is a strength. But it can also become a cognitive trap.

If a country has good banking apps, fast transfers and a successful domestic payment scheme, its financial elites may conclude that the future of finance will simply be an extension of what banks already do well. In such a mental model, digital finance becomes a banking upgrade. AI becomes bank efficiency. Regulation becomes bank stability. Programmable money becomes a question of whether banks can defend their role against non-bank players.

But blockchain-based finance is not merely a new front end for banks.

It changes the institutional structure of financial intermediation. It separates custody from brokerage, settlement from messaging, wallets from accounts, and programmable ownership from traditional record-keeping. It creates new risks, but also new forms of competition. It forces regulators to supervise entities, protocols, reserve structures, governance mechanisms and cross-border liquidity flows that do not fit easily into the traditional banking perimeter.

A financial congress that treats these questions as a one-hour side topic is not simply underweighting crypto. It is underweighting the institutional transformation of finance.

What this means for banks

Banks should not ignore digital assets because they dislike the speculative culture around crypto. The speculative layer is real, but it is not the whole story.

Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and blockchain settlement are already forcing banks to think about the future of money, liquidity and client relationships. If payment activity moves into wallet-based ecosystems, banks may lose not only transaction revenue but also data, customer interface and part of their role in working-capital flows.

This does not mean banks will disappear. That is not the point. The more realistic question is whether banks will become infrastructure builders in digital finance or whether they will defend their existing model until others build the rails.

What this means for regulators

For regulators, the problem is even more delicate.

Ignoring crypto does not make it safer. Treating it as a reputationally inconvenient topic does not reduce consumer risk. Refusing to engage with the sector does not prevent people from investing, using offshore exchanges, holding stablecoins or entering DeFi protocols.

Good supervision requires contact with the market. Not capture. Not promotion. Contact.

A regulator cannot supervise a sector well if its main posture toward that sector is distance. This is particularly important under MiCA, where national authorities will play a major role in licensing, supervising and enforcing rules for cryptoasset service providers.

The question is not whether regulators should be “pro-crypto”. They should not. The question is whether they can become competent enough to supervise the sector without pretending that it remains peripheral.

What this means for Poland

For Poland, the issue is strategic.

The country can remain a strong bank-technology market with limited influence over the next generation of financial infrastructure. Or it can start building competence in tokenisation, digital custody, compliant stablecoins, supervisory technology, on-chain analytics and capital-market infrastructure.

The first option is safer in the short term. The second is more demanding, but it is the one that gives a country a chance to participate in shaping the future rather than merely importing it.

This is why the imbalance in the EKF programme matters. It is not about event politics. It is not about whether one conference invited the right people. It is about what the Polish financial mainstream still considers worthy of serious discussion.

A one-hour discussion about programmable money, framed mainly as a challenge for banks, is not enough.

A broader conversation

One week after the European Financial Congress, Warsaw will host the 13th Digital Money & Blockchain Forum at Lazarski University.

The topic of the 2026 edition is Poland and MiCA: different approaches to digital-asset regulation, and who will win or lose under the emerging framework.

The Forum will take place on 8–9 June 2026 in Warsaw.

Registration and programme: https://digitalmoneyforum.biz/

The invitation is open to regulators, banks, fintechs, cryptoasset service providers, lawyers, academics, investors and anyone interested in the future of digital finance.

The central question is not whether banks will “lose ground”. The more important question is whether Poland wants to understand, regulate and build the next layer of financial infrastructure — or merely watch it emerge elsewhere.

It should also be read alongside my January essay on the “Visibility Shock,” where I argued that Bitcoin in 2026 behaves primarily as high-beta risk exposure, not as a safe haven.

This text is for information and discussion only. It is not investment advice.

The market still sees sentiment. The system is changing underneath it.

Bitcoin is once again trading around $70,000. That sounds strong until one remembers that the asset was near $126,000 in October 2025. The market is still deep in the psychology of drawdown, caution and selective risk-taking. Fear indicators remain elevated, and most price commentary still revolves around the usual short-term variables: macro, rates, war risk, ETF flows, and retail mood. The market review in episode 20 captured exactly that atmosphere: weak confidence, but improving structure underneath.

Yet the more important story is happening elsewhere.

Over the same period, the institutional architecture around digital assets kept getting stronger. In the United States, the SEC and CFTC moved toward a shared working interpretation of digital assets. Nasdaq announced tokenized-equity infrastructure work with Kraken. Mastercard moved deeper into stablecoin rails through BVNK. Revolut advanced its position as a fully regulated banking player. And in Poland, Virtune’s crypto ETPs reached the Warsaw Stock Exchange, including products with staking exposure on Ethereum and Solana. Those were not random headlines; they formed a consistent pattern of institutional absorption.

Traditional finance is no longer asking whether crypto matters. It is deciding which parts of crypto to absorb, regulate and distribute.

Why the 20 million milestone matters

On March 9, 2026, Bitcoin’s network mined the 20 millionth coin, in block 939999. That leaves only 1 million BTC still to be issued, with final issuance stretching out toward 2140. The program materials were right to emphasize the symbolic importance of that moment.

But the deeper point is not symbolism. It is constraint.

Most market participants know, in the abstract, that Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million. Very few model what happens when that cap is no longer distant, but visibly approaching. And fewer still incorporate the fact that a large part of the already-mined supply is no longer economically available.

According to the estimates cited in the program materials, roughly 2.3 to 3.7 million BTC may be permanently lost. That implies an effective supply meaningfully below the headline 20 million already in circulation. In practical terms, the market is not dealing with a fully usable stock of 20 million coins. It is dealing with a much tighter effective float.

That matters more than most commentary admits.

The chart that should change how people think about Bitcoin

This chart is the key visual in the argument.

On the left axis, it shows Bitcoin’s total circulating supply in millions of coins: a curve that rises quickly in the early years and then visibly flattens as issuance slows. On the right axis, it shows Bitcoin’s market price on a logarithmic scale. That logarithmic scale is essential: without it, the early price history would be visually distorted and the long-run relationship would be much harder to interpret. The source used in the program was Blockchain.com, and the note about the log scale is important enough to repeat here.

What does the chart show?

Not a simple one-variable explanation of price. Bitcoin’s price is still shaped by demand cycles, leverage, macro shocks, regulation and narrative. But the supply curve provides the structural envelope within which those demand shocks play out. As supply flattens, each new demand impulse operates against a progressively tighter issuance profile.

That is why I would not describe supply as a background condition. I would describe it as the monetary architecture of the asset.

Why this cycle is different

Earlier Bitcoin cycles had supply compression, but not the same institutional access. More recent cycles had institutional access, but under much thicker regulatory fog. What makes this moment different is the convergence of three processes.

1. Supply compression: more than 95% of total Bitcoin has already been mined, issuance keeps slowing, and the effective float is probably lower than the headline supply suggests.

2. Infrastructure: tokenization, ETFs, ETPs, stablecoin rails and regulated brokerage access are not speculative narratives. They are access channels. They do not guarantee immediate revaluation, but they reduce friction for capital that previously stayed out.

3. Regulatory clarification: not complete certainty. But enough operational clarity to reduce one of the largest historical discounts on institutional participation. The SEC/CFTC shift, the broader tokenization push, and even regulated market access in countries like Poland all point in the same direction.

That combination is new.

The market still trades Bitcoin as if it were only a volatile risk asset. In the short run, that remains true. But structurally, it is becoming something else as well: a highly constrained monetary asset that is gradually being connected to institutional distribution.

The question that matters

The wrong question is whether Bitcoin will be at $68,000 or $78,000 next month. The more interesting question is this:

What happens when a fixed-supply system becomes easier for regulated capital to access at the very moment when effective supply is tighter than the headline cap suggests?

That is not a short-term trading question. It is a structural one.

And structural questions tend to matter most before the majority of the market starts treating them seriously.

What I am watching next

Three things will determine whether this shift is real or only temporary.

1. The first is whether regulatory convergence keeps reducing uncertainty in a way that changes institutional behavior, not just headlines.

2. The second is whether infrastructure starts carrying real volume. Announcements are cheap. Usage is what matters.

3. The third is whether Bitcoin’s public narrative starts to move away from pure volatility and toward monetary structure. We are not there yet. But milestones like the 20 millionth Bitcoin help force that conversation.

Closing thought

Bitcoin is still being discussed mainly as a story about price.

Increasingly, it should be discussed as a system with tightening supply, improving access, and a shrinking margin for analytical laziness.

That does not eliminate volatility. It does change what serious investors should be paying attention to.

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I will keep tracking how supply, regulation, tokenization and institutional infrastructure reshape digital-asset markets — including from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe, where some of these structural shifts become visible earlier than the mainstream notices.

This essay is for information and discussion only. It is not investment advice, and it does not account for your personal situation or risk tolerance.

Outlooks: what this section is (and what it isn’t)

This is the first, fully free entry in my new Outlooks section. Think of it as a regime map—a framework for how markets may behave when the rules of the game become unstable. I plan to evolve this section over time, and later develop deeper paid research without turning the free essays into ads.

If you find this useful, pledges help me scale the research. And I’d genuinely like your input: what kind of paid analysis would you want to see in the future—macro maps, crypto cycle reports, policy risk dashboards, sector playbooks, or something else?

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The Geometry of Uncertainty: markets can price a tariff, not a fog

A market can price a 10% tariff. It cannot price the unknown duration, unknown exemptions, and unknown retaliation—especially when policy becomes a sequence of headline-driven moves.

That is the core argument in my earlier analysis of the trade-policy visibility shock—the idea that the true risk isn’t the tariff level itself, but the collapse of policy visibility. When visibility drops, firms delay CAPEX, investors demand higher premia, and “normal” correlations start behaving badly.

Economists have documented this mechanism: trade policy uncertainty functions like a silent tax on capital allocation (see Caldara et al., 2020, Journal of Monetary Economics). In plain English: you aren’t paying for “risk” anymore; you’re paying for the lack of a map.

1. Gold: non-sovereign insurance, not an inflation trade

In a ‘Visibility Shock’ regime, gold is not primarily a bet on CPI prints. It is non-sovereign insurance—an asset that is nobody else’s liability.

This is why my “gold thesis” is not a speculative story. It’s a regime story. When the distribution of outcomes widens to include political discontinuities—trade fragmentation, sanctions escalations, supply chain weaponization—capital reaches for assets outside the sovereign credit loop.

Gold’s “safe-haven” behavior is not guaranteed in every week, but it has been documented in episodes of extreme market stress (e.g., Baur & Lucey, 2010). The key for 2026 is the driver: if visibility remains structurally impaired, insurance demand tends to persist.

2. Liquidity: the most valuable asset that looks like boredom

In bull markets, cash looks like regret. In Visibility Shock markets, liquidity is ammunition.

The 2026 winner will often not be the investor with the boldest forecast, but the one who is never forced to sell. Optionality—being able to wait while others de-risk under pressure—is an asset when visibility goes to zero.

This is the part most investors underestimate. They optimize for returns in good regimes, then discover they optimized away the one thing that matters in bad regimes: freedom of action.

3. Coffee and soft commodities: the physical reality check

Why coffee? Because it stands for a broader class of assets exposed to physical supply shocks—climate, water stress, disease, harvest volatility—where central bank communication does not “fix” the supply curve.

Soft commodities are not a promise of easy profits. They are a reminder that in 2026, some risks are material, not monetary. That difference matters for diversification when policy shocks and climate shocks begin to overlap.

4. Resilience infrastructure: not an inflation hedge—a political mandate

Infrastructure is often marketed as an inflation hedge. The academic evidence for listed infrastructure is mixed and doesn’t justify simplistic claims.

But 2026 infrastructure is not mainly an inflation story. It is a resilience mandate story.

The world is shifting from “just-in-time” to “just-in-case”: energy security, grid hardening, localized logistics, defensive redundancy in supply chains, hardened networks. In Visibility Shock regimes, resilience spending is not a lifestyle choice—it’s increasingly policy-driven priority.

5. Bitcoin: high beta in risk-off—plus a cycle that still needs time

The most dangerous myth of 2026 is that Bitcoin reliably behaves like “digital gold” during trade-war-style panic.

When geopolitical tension spikes, leverage is the first thing to die. In those moments, Bitcoin tends to behave like a high-beta asset—more stress amplifier than shelter. That is exactly why the same regime that supports gold and liquidity can pressure Bitcoin: risk-off rotates away from leveraged, high-volatility exposures.

This is where my Bitcoin Cycle Map matters—not as an oracle, but as a scenario tool. On Nov 21, 2025, I published a cycle-based projection and visuals on X (links below) to show how I map the rhythm of lows, halvings, and peaks. I am deliberately not extending the projection far into future years here—those deeper paths belong to later, paid research.

Proof of publication date (Nov 21 posts):

My interpretation is blunt: after a leverage flush, markets don’t “reset” in weeks. They rebuild risk appetite over quarters and years. That is why, for 2026, I treat Bitcoin primarily as risk exposure with a cycle, not as insurance.

So my 2026 crypto posture is not “no crypto.” It’s selective crypto, concentrated where it intersects with traditional finance and real assets: regulated channels, tokenized real-world assets, and institutional-grade infrastructure—rather than broad “risk-on everything” bets.

The 2026 rule: survive, don’t predict

The 2026 portfolio should not be optimized for one forecast. It should be optimized for survivability in a low-visibility world.

When fog thickens, you don’t floor the accelerator. You check your brakes (gold), top up your fuel (liquidity), diversify into the material world (selected real assets), and treat Bitcoin for what it is under stress: high beta with a cycle, not a safe haven.

A note on what comes next

This is the baseline for my Outlooks section. I’ll post updates as the regime evolves—especially when trade policy, liquidity conditions, and crypto leverage dynamics shift.

If you want to support this work, pledges help. And I’d like to hear from you in the comments: what kind of premium analysis would you actually pay for—a 2026 macro scenario map, a deeper Bitcoin cycle report with explicit ranges and triggers, an “optionality dashboard,” sector playbooks, or something else?

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