In the past month, ELLIPAL exhibited at the two largest crypto conferences in the Americas: Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas (Booth #1140) and Consensus 2026 in Miami (Booth #2118).
The two events draw different crowds. Bitcoin 2026 is built around sound money and self-sovereignty, with 40,000 attendees and an official theme of "All In On the Future of Money."
Consensus, hosted by CoinDesk, is where crypto meets Wall Street; this year institutional attendees made up roughly 35% of the room, representing an estimated $10 trillion in assets under management.
Different crowds, same conversation. Here is what we heard at both.
The Common Thread: Stablecoins
In Las Vegas, one of the most-discussed sessions belonged to Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. He spoke on a Bitcoin stage about the future of dollar stablecoins. Some in the room disagreed. Most listened closely.
In Miami, stablecoins were not a side session. They were the through-line. By day two, speaker after speaker had landed on the same idea: stablecoins are the bridge between crypto and the rest of the financial system.
At Consensus, Donald Trump Jr. pushed back on the fear that stablecoins threaten the U.S. dollar: "The false narrative about how stablecoins are going to be a threat to dollar hegemony ... Stablecoins are going to be the savior."
The numbers explain why both events kept circling back to it. Stablecoin market capitalization crossed $320 billion in early May. The asset class settled trillions of dollars in transaction volume last year, a figure now compared to Visa rather than to other crypto assets. Since the GENIUS Act established a federal framework, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Western Union, and Meta have all moved into stablecoin payments.
And the policy clock keeps moving. On May 14, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee voted 15 to 9, with bipartisan support, to advance the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act to the Senate floor. Its most-watched provision is the treatment of stablecoin yield: the bill bans interest-like rewards on passive holdings, while allowing rewards tied to actual activity such as trading or staking. The trend both conferences pointed to is being written into law in real time.
A Bitcoin-native audience and an institutional one rarely agree on much. This year, they agreed on this. But the rise of stablecoins is pushing a question that used to live on the fringe of crypto into the middle of everyone's life: self-custody.
Self-Custody Is a System, Not a Device
Here is why that shift matters. For most of the last decade, self-custody was a niche concern, and it meant one thing: buying a hardware wallet. One device, one seed phrase, done.
Stablecoins change that. When digital dollars become something an ordinary person holds, self-custody stops being a question for crypto-natives and becomes a question for everyone. The people asking it at our booths were not asking about a single device. They were asking how the whole setup fits together.
How do you hold a balance you spend every week without exposing your long-term savings? How do you keep a backup that survives a house fire or ten years in a drawer? How does someone in your family reach the funds if you are not around to walk them through it?
Those are not hardware questions. They are questions about a system. A cold wallet is one part of it. So is a physical backup, a separate wallet for daily spending, and a clear recovery plan.
This is also where most real-world losses come from. Not from broken hardware, but from the gaps around it: a hot wallet holding more than it should, a backup that was never made, a phishing message that got through. The device is rarely the weak point. The system around it is.
What We Showed in Las Vegas and Miami
At both booths, visitors got hands-on with the full ELLIPAL air-gapped lineup: Titan 2.0, X Card, and Seed Phrase Steel. We built our product line around those parts. Each can be used on its own, and together they work as a system. A primary air-gapped signer, a card-format wallet for everyday access, and a steel backup built to outlast the device it protects. Together they cover BTC and major stablecoins across 40+ blockchains, with every transaction signed offline.
The questions at both booths tracked the conversation on the main stages. People wanted to know how to custody a stablecoin balance, not just how to store a single coin.
Why We Are Building PayDAO
Self-custody should not stop at savings. It should reach the moment money actually moves.
That is the thinking behind PayDAO, a crypto-native stablecoin payment protocol that ELLIPAL co-initiated alongside other teams in the space. Its stated goal is to restore value and control to payment participants, rather than the intermediaries between them. In practice, it lets a merchant accept stablecoins by tap-to-pay on Solana, with settlement in seconds, fees under 1%, and custody staying in the merchant's hands the entire time.
It is early. But the principle is the same one that runs through everything we build. The person who owns the money should control the money, whether it is sitting in savings or moving across a counter.
Voices from the Floor
A few things we heard, again and again:
"I didn't think a cold wallet could fit in my actual wallet. That's clever."
"Tap-to-sign is the smartest thing I've seen on the floor. Why didn't anyone do this sooner?"
"I want one device for my BTC and a way to keep my stablecoins offline too."
These are not testimonials. They are a direction. People want self-custody that fits the way they actually hold and use money.
Where This Leaves Us
A large part of the future of money looks like dollars on a blockchain. The open question is whether self-custody is ready to hold it. That is the work we are focused on, and we will have more to share soon.
About ELLIPAL:
For nearly eight years, ELLIPAL has been working on one thing: making self-custody actually usable, and now trusted by over 1 million people worldwide. That work is moving forward along two parallel paths.
One is the Titan series, our air-gapped line built to push offline signing to its limits. The other is X Card: a card-sized cold wallet built around tap-to-Web3, designed to make self-custody as effortless as tapping a card.
Two paths, one goal. Making self-custody something an ordinary person can set up, back up, and rely on for years. For Bitcoin, for stablecoins, and for whatever they choose to hold.