Between the 17th and 22nd of November 2025, over 10,000 people gathered in Buenos Aires for what is to be the biggest event in the crypto community for the year. In attendance were builders, teams, founders, agencies etc. I met with a lot of teams, attended as many events as I could and spoke to just about anyone I came in contact with. This post is a non exhaustive summary of the highlights of the event based on my personal experiences through it all.

TL’DR

DevConnect ARG 2025 spotlighted privacy as essential, with FHE, ZK privacy pools, and client-side proofs gaining traction. Interop advanced through shared sequencers, intents, and Composers, aiming for seamless cross-chain UX by 2026. Stablecoins thrived amid 200%+ inflation in Argentina, powering everyday payments. Crypto cards were everywhere, MetaMask’s non-custodial Mastercard debit and Burner.pro’s seedless NFC card stood out. Peanut.me impressed with instant USDC-to-any-currency payments and won the Startup World Cup. Monad aligned a Coinbase token sale with its Nov 24 mainnet launch. TradFi moved on RWAs with tokenization efforts from major players. The week was packed with workshops, judging, mentoring, and booths. Argentina truly felt like the crypto capital of the world.

Privacy

Privacy made the jump from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have infrastructure’ for the next wave of Ethereum adoption. The big message was that institutions, DeFi apps, and everyday users in places like Argentina now demand on-chain transactions that stay verifiable for auditors/regulators but hidden from the public.

Some of the popular solutions I saw were:

• Zama’s fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that lets you compute on encrypted data without ever decrypting it.

• New ZK-based private pools and shielded transfers (Aztec, Railgun, Nightfall, Miden).

• I heard some chatter about client-side proving solutions (so your wallet can prove compliance without ever exposing amounts or addresses). Vitalik also gave a wake-up call that quantum computers could break today’s signatures by 2030, so the ecosystem is urgently moving to privacy + quantum-resistant designs at the same time.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins were the breakout real-world story at DevConnect. In Argentina (where official inflation is 200%+), people are actively using USDC/USDT for daily savings, remittances, and making payments for cabs, coffee and asados. The event showcased how Stablecoins were powering everything from crypto cards (MetaMask Card) and QR apps (Peanut) to on-chain casinos and prediction markets.

There was a panel session with Visa, Circle, and LatAm neobanks made it clear that stablecoins are no longer just trading pairs — they’re becoming the default global settlement layer for both consumers and institutions in high-inflation countries.

Crypto Cards

Crypto cards were everywhere at DevConnect, people were using them to shop for merch, buy coffee, pay for cabs, the lot. MetaMask card was particularly popular as they led with their non-custodial Mastercard debit that converts on-chain and gives 1-3% USDC cashback. They marketed through gamified booths with football challenges and TRON collabs for Solana support with did really well.

Burner.pro also made a huge impact with their slim, seedless burner card for gifting and daily use. It is PIN-protected, NFC-tap to pay stables via their Terminal, no apps needed, and issues affordable backups for security. I got two of these so if you’re reading and would like to get one, let me know in the comments and I can arrange for you to take 1.

There might also be other crypto cards that I didn’t get the opportunity to interact with so add more in the comments for readers if you know of any.

Interop

Fragmentation is still one of the biggest remaining barriers to mass adoption of crypto, and DevConnect was all about fixing it. One of the loudest ideas were bridgeless cross-chain (Espresso’s shared sequencers), intent-based protocols (Across, Socket), and orchestration tools like the LI.FI Composer that bundles multi-step on-chain actions like swaps and bridges into atomic single-transactions 'zaps'.

The Composer leverages LI.FI's aggregation for cross-chain efficiency across multiple chains. There was a good sense of conviction that by late 2026 most users won’t notice they’re moving between chains as liquidity and UX will just feel seamless. We are not quite there yet, but it felt like we were closer than ever before.

Peanut.me

Peanut.me stole the show in payments at DevConnect. It was not surprising that they won the the Startup World Cup pitch. I was one of the judges during the semi final stage of the pitch so I had the opportunity to listen to the founder’s. While demonstrating the app, the co-founder Konrad made a $1 transfer which I received instantly, that was the moment I knew they were onto something. Peanut is a beta-stage app built on Arbitrum that abstracts crypto payments into something as easy as Cash App, but global, cheap, and (mostly) KYC-free.

They had a huge turnout at their booth, showing everyone how to pay for food, drinks, and even split bills using USDC that converts straight to pesos.

Monad

Monad launched the first-ever token sale on Coinbase at DevConnect, selling 7.5 billion #MON tokens at $0.025. In my opinion, they timed it perfectly in preparation for the November 24 mainnet launch which gave them all the more momentum for it. They followed it up with other side events like a Consumer Payments Forum they did with Bitso and other Tether execs focused on unpacking LATAM stablecoin booms.

TradFi / RWAs

TradFi finally showed up ready to play. Banks and institutions are tokenizing real-world assets (bonds, funds, credit) on public chains to access on-chain yields and 24/7 liquidity. Highlights included Robinhood launching tokenized assets on Arbitrum, Citi’s global head of digital assets pushing for common standards, and Chainlink/Stellar sessions laying out 2025–2030 adoption timelines. The vibe shifted from ‘Will banks ever use public blockchains?’ to ‘How fast can we make it compliant and scalable?

These are just the highlights of the events and projects that caught my attention, I’m sure there’s a lot more happening at other corners of the event (share more in the comments).

What I was up to

I was busy at DevConnect, amongst other things here are some of the places you would’ve found me:

• I was at the Aleph Hub as a Judge for the seminal final pitch session of the Startup World Cup. This is where I met with founders pitching their projects to progress through the rounds. Including Peanut.me, PiggyWallet, Bond.credit, Midatopay, Damm Capital amongst others.

• I gave a workshop at Aleph Hub on Off-chain brains and Onchain Gains diving into the state of transactions as they flow through the LI.FI architecture from smart order routing to onchain executions for same and cross chain swaps/bridging.

• I was on a Panel Session discussing DeFi and Stablecoins along with other panelists from Polygon and KPK.

• I was at MetaMasks Builder night were I met with a lot of builders, had a long chat with Nader Dabit, and other builders from Stellar, Starknet, Ledger, Quantdefi, etc.

• I was a mentor at the ETH Argentina Hackathon which ran for multiple days, I had the opportunity to learn about some of the exciting projects that the builders were working on and help them with ideation and implementation details

• I attended Sui’s Connect event where I met with some potential partners and had one of the best food in the conference.

• I was at WalletCon at the Polo House manning the LI.FI booth, chatting with attendees and reconnecting with the LI.FI team as we had a constant flow of traffic to the booth.

• I interviewed Daniel Josep who leads the metamask cards product at Consensys and I got to learn more about the card initiatives how they’re leveraging LI.FI and some other exciting plans they got coming up.

• I was at the closing ceremony where the DevConnect team announced the location for the next DevConnect event which will be happening in India Q4 2026 amongst other things

• Had a LI.FI team dinner where we all came together to share asado with our wonderful host @julimorla. Saved the best for the last, literally!

In general, it was a busy week filled with rewarding activities.

As we wrapped up, my closing thoughts were that Argentina is definitely the crypto capital of the world. The fact that people can already solve real life problems with crypto was amazing to me. DevConnect brought a ton of people to the city and yet it was so well organized that it never truly felt chaotic, the Argentinians are warm welcoming people that give the best hugs with a peck on the cheek and ready to help at any time regardless of the language barrier. It was a great outing!