2026-05-08 –, Grégr Stage
Ethereum's strongest defenses start with imagining how the system breaks. Three failure modes: visibility, preemption, and autonomy, each framed through speculative fiction and mapped to concrete protocol responses: encrypted mempools, ordering fairness, and the emerging challenge of agent-dominated markets. Speculative imagination isn't a luxury for builders. It's part of the design process.
This talk comes from a recurring pattern I've noticed while working in blockchain infrastructure and security: the most interesting problems don't appear when systems work as intended, but when you ask how they break.
At the same time, I've always been deeply interested in science fiction literature, not just for its ability to imagine the future, but for how it sharpens our view of the present. The stories that stayed with me were never just speculative; they made visible the systems, incentives, and human dynamics that already exist but are often overlooked. Over time, that perspective started to align with how I think about Ethereum. The sci-fi framing in this talk is a way to surface and reason about failure modes that are already around us.
The talk is structured around three of those failure modes (visibility, preemption, and autonomy), each grounded in a specific work of speculative fiction and connected to an active area of Ethereum development: encrypted mempools and threshold encryption, MEV resistance and ordering fairness, and the emerging challenge of autonomous agents operating on-chain.
I'm particularly interested in how this applies to current developments. Encrypted mempools are moving from research to mainnet deployment. Toxic MEV has been named as a priority in Ethereum's 2026 roadmap. AI agents are gaining on-chain identities and economic capabilities through new standards. These systems are already pushing beyond the assumptions many current designs still rely on, around visibility, fairness, and human participation.
The goal of the talk is to offer a simple lens that builders can reuse: instead of starting from ideal conditions, start from adversarial ones and design from there. That perspective has been central to the cypherpunk tradition, and it feels increasingly relevant as Ethereum systems become more complex and less human-centered.
Leads operations at Zondax AG, a blockchain engineering company building security-critical infrastructure across major protocol ecosystems. Engineering background; building Kunobi to improve how complex infrastructure systems are operated. Focuses on privacy, resilience, and adversarial thinking in complex systems. Active as a hackathon and women-in-STEM advocate.