Newly rebranded Signal Week unites major crypto players

Paris Blockchain Week is now Signal Week, a reflection of cryptocurrency’s global expansion.

The newly rebranded event is joining forces with RAISE Summit, the annual AI and networking conference, and Machina Summit, Europe’s leading physical AI event. Event organizers expect approximately 2,500 attendees, highlighting the growing profile of blockchain technology.

“The industry has changed a lot,” said Michael Amar (pictured), chairman of RAISE Summit and co-founder of Signal Week. “We really want to be the place where we bridge traditional finance and digital assets. It’s where the market is finally, and we are embracing it completely. We have the desire to go abroad to launch other conferences. So it made sense that … we join everything under the same roof, but different flows, different marketing and different ticketing.”

Amar and Charlie Meraud (pictured), chairman of RAISE Summit and co-founder of Signal Week, spoke with theCUBE host Gemma Allen, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what to expect at the 2027 event and the evolution of cryptocurrency. (* Disclosure below.)

A signal of crypto’s growing presence

Signal Week is designed to cover the intersection between institutional finance and digital assets. Since its founding, the crypto market has grown to $40 billion in tokenized real-world assets, or RWA, according to Meraud. The week will also encompass the CXO Summit, a private gathering of C-suite executives.

“The CXO Summit is organizing a roundtable under Chatham House rules with these … crypto-native players discussing all sophisticated topics around what they are building and how they can partner all year long,” he said. “This is the kind of activation that makes people book a flight, buy a ticket and come to Signal Week. The industry needed a room for these players to connect and start actually doing business.”

Both founders see facilitating conversations between crypto leaders and traditional finance executives as one of the primary goals of the conference. The chief executive officers of Kaiko, Morpho and Fireblocks, all leading digital asset companies, are expected to attend. European Union regulators will also be present, Amar and Meraud emphasize, which will be critical for understanding the future of AI-powered finance.

“We’re creating those moments where people can get the most out of the conference,” Amar said. “If you talk about the C-suite, people coming from traditional finance and meeting the makers of the crypto industry, we’re creating the space where they will have talks in a very small room where actually we go very much into the details of the use cases of the implementation of a digital asset solution for a bank, for example.”

Another key topic at Signal Week and RAISE Summit will be custody, the safekeeping of private keys that allow a person to prove they control an address and the cryptocurrency it holds. Security has long been a divisive issue for cryptocurrency, spurring a variety of solutions.

“When we started … self-custody was one of the promised digital assets,” Meraud said. “A lot of players have been offering different ways of custodying digital assets. And having the most sophisticated solution coming to Signal Week, explaining all the new features, they’ve been building over the years is one of the reasons financial institutions are willing to connect and network with our audience.”

Here’s the complete video interview:

Image: SiliconANGLE