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Stablecoins, AI Agents & the Future of On-chain
Speaker: Jeff Wentworth — Curvegrid
ETHGlobal Tokyo 2026 · Workshop · Friday, September 25, 2026
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFiGBkEpBlU
Transcribed with aloha by the AI ʻohana 🌺
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[00:00] Good afternoon everyone. Good to see you. Some familiar faces here and I think some
[00:15] obviously lots of new faces as well. This is Stablecoins AI agents and the
[00:22] future of on-chain apps. This is the workshop for Curvegrid. I'm Jeff. I'm one
[00:27] of the co-founders of Curvegrid. We are a nine-year-old blockchain technology
[00:32] company based here in Tokyo, Japan. You may have seen us around before at various
[00:39] ETH Global events. This is actually ETH Global Tokyo 2023, three years ago. This
[00:45] is our whole crew with our red jumpsuits today. It's a little warmer. I just have
[00:50] the jacket inside but there's a number of us here through the weekend.
[00:56] Please come and say hi and we'd love for you to build with us. Three years ago
[01:02] we had a lot more people that we brought to the event, partly because it was a lot
[01:07] more difficult to build applications. People needed a lot more help, a lot more
[01:13] engineering support. I know that I mentored at ETH Global New York this
[01:20] past summer and I've mentored at a number of ETH Global hackathons in the
[01:24] past as well. Lots of difficult solidity questions, no dependency
[01:29] questions, how do I debug this particular smart contract? This time I
[01:34] had zero technical questions because of AI. Is anybody in here not using
[01:39] AI to code? I salute you. I salute all the rest of you for using AI. Of course
[01:45] we are. The whole world has changed in in the last almost year since
[01:50] coding agents have gotten very very good. There's fewer of us this time.
[01:56] What I want to do first is talk a little bit about Curvegrid and our journey and
[02:01] then I'm going to talk a little bit about our thoughts for this
[02:05] hackathon and what we're hoping some of you might build. I'm going to
[02:10] go first and actually just open up our website. Curvegrid.com, we
[02:16] basically do three different things. We have a blockchain development platform
[02:22] called Multibass and we've had this in production for I guess the better part of
[02:26] seven years. A number of you I'm sure have built on it or have built before with it.
[02:30] We've had customers from from large companies, you know, large Fortune 100
[02:37] companies in Japan to Global Web 3 projects build on this our technology
[02:43] platform or development platform to get their blockchain applications to market
[02:47] faster, easier and cheaper than if they did everything from scratch. This is the
[02:50] first thing that we offer, Multibass. The second thing that we do is consulting
[02:56] services, right? So we help companies basically write smart contracts or build
[03:01] parts of their blockchain applications generally using Multibass and I should
[03:07] add like I showed you a little screenshot of what Multibass look like.
[03:10] I'll come back to this in a few minutes but this is the Multibass
[03:13] dashboard that blockchain developers, software developers would would typically
[03:17] use and then the third thing that we do and this is a lot newer is basically
[03:22] we've taken the learnings from a blockchain development platform and how
[03:28] both we have used it and how our customers have used it to manage their
[03:32] corporate treasury of stablecoins and digital assets and we're now building a
[03:38] much more specific platform to help companies and individuals do this. So
[03:43] it's a treasury management, primarily a corporate treasury management platform for
[03:47] digital assets. I'm going to give you probably the first public sneak peek
[03:51] ever of it. It's called Neo. It's going to be coming out in
[03:57] minimum viable product or MVP format very soon, probably next month but
[04:03] that's the new product that we're working on. So basically we have
[04:06] these two products Multibass and then our new digital asset technology product.
[04:11] So that's a little bit about CurveGrid. Okay, now ETH Global Tokyo Hackathon.
[04:20] So this is first I'm going to talk I'm going to talk a little bit about well we
[04:25] need a theme. We need a theme for something to kind of make it interesting.
[04:28] So our theme for our sample application is the Matsuri or Japanese festival.
[04:33] First of all show of hands, how many people think that this is a real photo
[04:37] and how many people, real photo? Anyone versus AI photo, real photo? All right, about
[04:44] half. AI photo? Who's not sure? All right, so about half and half. It is actually a
[04:51] real photo but I thought I would it was actually faster just to search for and
[04:58] actually I took this photo too so it's faster to search for a photo that I had
[05:01] in Google Photos. So Japanese festival is a Matsuri. Some of you may have been
[05:05] to one if you haven't and there happens to be one on tomorrow maybe after the
[05:10] Hackathon concludes. Sorry, not tomorrow, Sunday. After the Hackathon concludes
[05:13] maybe you want to go check it out. So that the starting idea that we have and
[05:18] we have a sample repository for this is use stablecoins to purchase vouchers
[05:23] that can be redeemed for food, drinks, games, activities at a Matsuri or at a
[05:28] Japanese festival. And where we're going with this is you know if you have this
[05:37] sample application that involves a stablecoin payments and vouchers then
[05:43] how do you turn that or what do you do to kind of turn that into an agentic
[05:46] workflow. And this is where we want to kind of help all of you you know achieve
[05:52] this throughout the weekend. So what we have here is we have our sample
[05:56] application, this repo, which you can point your agents at. Codex or Claude or
[06:02] Grok or you know your agent of choice. And basically it has in here
[06:10] Supetonut's smart contracts for the stablecoin, the Matsuri stablecoin and
[06:16] a voucher and Supetonut's front-end React application. And it basically looks
[06:23] like this once you get it up and running right. And this front-end uses
[06:30] Multibass, uses our you know our blockchain development platform to
[06:35] interact with the blockchain, to compose and send transactions to the blockchain
[06:42] as well as to read data from the blockchain. So once you get all of this
[06:46] running and we have it running here on the Mizuhiki Awaji testnet, you can use
[06:51] Sepolia or your local development network or testnet of choice and just to plug
[06:55] Mizuhiki for a second. This is a Japan based blockchain that is built for the
[07:01] Japanese market. It's based on Ethereum, basically with the distributed proof of
[07:07] staked authority that we you know our curve grid has been very kind of
[07:12] instrumental in helping to bring to market. It's got a number of major
[07:15] Japanese companies that have been backing it. So here we have this
[07:22] application, this sample application deployed on their testnet. I have already
[07:27] issued some stablecoins to my test address here. I'm now going to do the
[07:32] standard approve for the voucher. So I'm going to now purchase this voucher. So
[07:37] I'm approving the purchase of the stablecoins and then once that goes
[07:40] through, I'm now going to buy the voucher. Does this happen?
[07:46] Does this work? There we go. You can see I've purchased the voucher and if I come down here,
[07:52] there we go. I can see that vouchers have been transferred basically and stablecoin
[07:57] balances are existent in there. So these balances and activities are being
[08:02] driven by the multibass chain indexer and the transactions are all being
[08:07] driven by multibass. So this is our sort of end-to-end Matsuri or Japanese
[08:12] festival. Get rid of Minimass there. Sample application. Okay, so this repo,
[08:20] this sample app gives you a kind of working pattern but we're going to reward
[08:25] what you build, not which stack that you build on. So this is like a little bit
[08:29] different for us because usually we require that you use our technology but
[08:34] that's not the case. So there's you know different paths that we're
[08:39] happy to have you take here, right? You can fork this repository, modify the
[08:43] contracts, the UX, you could just borrow the pattern, right? You can take this
[08:47] pattern and build something else with it as kind of inspiration or you can start
[08:51] fresh and do kind of anything that you want. And so we don't have any required
[08:56] dependency or requirement that you build on multibass or that you use our
[09:00] technology in order to qualify for our partner prices this time. So you know
[09:11] I'm going to take a step back for a second for those of you who are maybe you
[09:14] know a little bit less technical or just to sort of set the stage because
[09:17] because I think it's important to kind of visualize this, right? Typically you
[09:22] have at least in this sample repo you've got a user talking to a UI with
[09:28] their wallet that submits a transaction to the the smart contract, right? So this
[09:33] is the absolute sort of simplest kind of pattern that you could imagine. Then
[09:41] with the stablecoins, right, you're actually purchasing this NFT voucher
[09:47] and then the merchant is redeeming it later. So what I want you to do is imagine
[09:52] like you know we've been so focused, we're often so focused in hackathons and like
[09:56] how can I do this technical thing but I think it's much more interesting to
[10:00] think about like okay what exactly are we trying to accomplish, right? And some
[10:05] ideas around the sorts of things that you can modify, right? We could you
[10:08] know instead of it being an NFT voucher you could have some sort of like trading
[10:13] card system. You know you could you could make this kind of like a multi
[10:18] matzure, a multi festival kind of setup. There's lots of different things that
[10:25] that you can obviously do here. And then I think the interesting next step that
[10:32] we really would like to see from some teams this weekend is to actually
[10:38] replace the human in the loop from clicking with an agent, right? So this
[10:44] whole user interface that we're used to in the past where you've got buttons that
[10:49] do things like you know let me approve this this spend and let me buy this
[10:55] voucher and then let me redeem this voucher. This is fine but I think that
[11:00] many of us who have been playing around with agentic technology for you know
[11:05] the past many months or past you know a little bit more than a year
[11:09] understand that there's other UI paradigms that are very very interesting
[11:14] right? And so what does that look like? It could look like a chat interface. It
[11:20] could look like you know you're actually speaking to the agent. It could look it
[11:26] could look something you know entirely different than these kinds of
[11:29] standard buttons in a web user interface. And in fact it may not even be I want
[11:35] to buy a voucher. It could be something more along the lines of you know I want
[11:41] to you know I have friends at the festival and we want to to go have dinner
[11:47] what should we do? Which I'll come back to in a second. The other thing that we're
[11:52] like very interested in seeing is the kinds of and sorry the the the
[11:55] sunglass emoji there is for you know in in references obviously Top Gun for any
[12:01] of those if you've seen you know thought about the danger zone before but
[12:05] but this is real right? We've all run into situations where AI has has done scary
[12:12] things right? So the first thing that we suggest is not putting private keys
[12:16] inside of the agent or giving the agent access to the private keys and these
[12:20] are sort of things that we're looking for when when judging you know the
[12:25] prizes. The second is not to let prompts become policy right? So the idea
[12:32] that prompts are fairly like the prompts that are being fed to agents are
[12:37] non-deterministic and there's newer technologies like Jev has become
[12:40] popular recently I'm speaking with one hacker who is thinking of doing
[12:43] something with them you know to integrate Jev Jev this weekend but but don't
[12:48] assume that you just because of what you've written into a markdown file
[12:52] that you're feeding to the agent is is going to be the truth is is going
[12:55] to be the truth. And the final piece is not to skip human accountability so
[12:59] when we're thinking about our new product right this this treasury management
[13:03] product that we're building an on-chain finance it's very very important that
[13:07] humans are in the loop and have can take on some of this accountability you
[13:13] know so for example right a user creates the intent the AI agent processes that
[13:17] but on the other side of that sits a policy engine and another round of
[13:21] human approval and a secure signer and then the blockchain itself so in in
[13:26] nowhere you could see in the gray squares on the right hand side here we've
[13:30] clearly delineated the private key and ownership over the private key and any
[13:34] sign off on the actual transaction from you know giving the agent access to
[13:41] that that said this is a hackathon you know ideally you're not giving agents
[13:53] keys you're not giving the agent sort of this unlimited control over things
[13:58] you're not going to you know there's certainly going to be situations or or
[14:03] let's say you know challenges that you run into this weekend where you're you're
[14:08] you know as a hackathon you are giving the agent private keys or prompts
[14:13] etc etc that that are sort of that our you know policy is the prompt that's
[14:18] okay but that's not really like the idea like the ultimate idea if we're
[14:23] thinking about this in terms of you know how we have agents manage money you you
[14:30] want to try and separate those things so these are the three prize categories
[14:35] that we're offering the first is RWA tokenization so do something involving
[14:41] programmable assets the second is a digital asset dashboard and dashboard I
[14:46] use very very loosely because you know that we're all used to looking at
[14:50] charts and and tables and graphs and things like that but what does a
[14:54] dashboard look like in an agentic era like it maybe it's not even the
[14:58] traditional
[15:00] traditional looking type of dashboard.
[15:01] Maybe it's something that I can query
[15:03] and have a conversation with.
[15:05] And then the third thing is just AI project in general, right?
[15:10] What is the kind of the deepest that you can go
[15:14] with integrating AI into digital assets
[15:18] and stablecoins and programmable money?
[15:21] So multi-bas use of our platform
[15:24] is actually optional this time.
[15:26] We'd love it if you did make some use of it,
[15:29] but that's not actually a requirement
[15:30] for our partner prizes.
[15:37] So again, this was an example I mentioned briefly earlier.
[15:40] Like let's, maybe your entire app
[15:43] is just connected into Telegram or WhatsApp
[15:46] or a chat text box on your website.
[15:51] And rather than this kind of interface
[15:54] where you've got buttons to click,
[15:56] you're just simply saying,
[15:58] look, I have 3,000 yen, find lunch for four people
[16:01] and buy the vouchers, or maybe not even buy the vouchers.
[16:03] I have 3,000 yen, like I want to buy lunch.
[16:06] Or where do I have lunch today?
[16:07] Oh, there's a amounts in nearby.
[16:09] Let me go and here's my proposed,
[16:12] I propose that, why don't I buy these vouchers
[16:14] and you can dream for these foods,
[16:17] these delicious food, for example.
[16:25] So it starts to look more like this, right?
[16:28] Where the LLM or the agentic runtime
[16:33] is basically sitting at the top of the stack
[16:36] rather than integrated into the,
[16:38] somewhere into the bottom of the stack.
[16:42] And again, this is something I think
[16:46] we all probably struggle with in our day-to-day work.
[16:48] Like how and where and when do we integrate agents
[16:52] into our workflow and how do we separate
[16:57] what is vibe-coded from very carefully engineered.
[17:01] But I think this is probably a pretty good way
[17:04] to kind of delineate the two, right?
[17:06] Anything that involves, again, key custody,
[17:08] authorization or authentication or approvals and policies.
[17:13] And certainly anything that involves recovery
[17:16] or audit laws or proof of what's happened.
[17:18] Everything else I think is fair game for vibe-coding.
[17:23] So this is it, our little tagline,
[17:27] Ethereum settles value, AI creates intent,
[17:29] the missing layer decides whether money should move
[17:32] and the missing layer is what we hope that you build.
[17:36] This is our sample repository.
[17:38] If you go to github.com slash curvegrid,
[17:41] it should be one of the top,
[17:42] one of the first repos there.
[17:44] And we also have a QR code at our booth
[17:46] that you can scan that'll direct you in this direction.
[17:49] And then our prizes as well,
[17:51] which are just under our sponsor page
[17:52] on the ETH Global dashboard.
[17:58] And that's about it, thank you.
[18:05] I think I have a couple minutes left, any questions?
[18:10] No, okay, excellent, thanks.
[18:13] Have a great weekend, everybody.