146 organisations. Fourteen counties. Twelve sectors. Put them on one map and Ireland's blockchain economy looks rather different from the story we usually tell about it.

At the Blockchain Ireland Summit on 22 October, the theme was “The Next Era of Finance: The Onchain Age”. The Sugar Club brought together people working on payments, funds, property, financial crime and AI. What interests me is how much of that future is already being built here, often inside organisations people would never describe as blockchain companies.

The summit’s theme: The Next Era of Finance: The Onchain Age. Artwork: Blockchain Ireland.

Ireland does not need another claim to be a global hub. It needs to make the work visible, connect the people doing it, and remove the obstacles that keep good ideas from reaching customers.

Stuart Schneller and I built the Irish Blockchain Ecosystem Map and accompanying graphic for Blockchain Ireland's Startups and Web3 Working Group. The purpose was simple: bring the companies, institutions, research groups and supporting organisations into one place.

Blockchain Ireland, October 2026. Open the full-resolution graphic or download the PDF.

The October map covers 146 organisations across twelve sectors. Exchanges and custody sit alongside payments, identity, legal services, universities and government. Dublin is the centre of gravity, but the activity runs across the island. The map includes Blockdaemon in Galway, Rakuten's blockchain lab in Belfast, LedgerLens in Limerick, Sedicii in Waterford and Stateless Research in Derry.

That geographical spread matters. An ecosystem needs more than a handful of headquarters. It needs people who can build the infrastructure, explain the law, train the next cohort and help a new company find its first customer. Seeing those capabilities together changes the question from “is anything happening here?” to “how do we help it grow?”

Blockchain Ireland's own Spotlight episode on Derry is a good way into that regional story. It is part of the organisation's wider ecosystem series, rather than a recording of this year's summit.

The strongest evidence is in the financial infrastructure.

Citi extended Token Services to Dublin and added euro transactions in November 2025. Its corporate and institutional clients can move dollars and euros around the clock between participating Citi accounts, using a private, permissioned blockchain. Dublin is part of an operating network, not simply the location of a research project.

Source: Citi, Investor Day 2026, Services presentation, slide 10. Token Services was live in five markets and two currencies; the slide also sets out planned capabilities. Dublin’s role is detailed in Citi’s euro expansion announcement.

In August, BlackRock introduced twelve tokenised share classes across six European money market funds, using Ethereum and Kinexys by J.P. Morgan. The underlying funds held a combined $311 billion in assets. That is the size of the funds, not the amount tokenised. The distinction matters, but so does the development: an established investment product is gaining a new way to be held and transferred.

Ireland has an unusually strong base for this. Mason Hayes & Curran's September analysis describes the country as the world's third-largest fund domicile, servicing over €7.3 trillion in assets. It also records Central Bank approval of tokenised share classes for three money market funds and “digital twin” arrangements that keep a traditional register alongside a digital record.

That creates a practical route from today's funds infrastructure to new forms of distribution, collateral and settlement. It also explains why the legal work matters as much as the software. A token is useful only if the ownership and rights behind it are clear.

How the pieces connect: J.P. Morgan and Apollo’s Project Guardian proof of concept links fund tokens, deposit tokens and portfolio management across networks. Original diagram from Portfolio Management Powered by Tokenization, p. 26 (PDF p. 27). This illustrates a research prototype, not an Irish deployment or the BlackRock launch above.

The ecosystem map also lists twelve Irish MiCA-authorised entities, including two Kraken entities. That is another part of the picture, distinct from the map's broader count of organisations. For a current authorisation check, the reference points are the Central Bank register and ESMA's MiCA register and guidance.

The programme connected three questions: how money moves, what can be represented on-chain, and who is accountable when these systems become more autonomous.

Kevin Dowling of Stripe, Alessandro Da Rold of Payward and Katie Ferriter of Northern Trust approached the infrastructure question through talks on stablecoins, payments and digital asset delivery. Myles Clarke of CBRE Ireland put real estate tokenisation on the agenda. These are different markets, but they share a problem: moving value still involves too many systems that cannot talk to each other.

Alessandro Da Rold at the Sugar Club, 22 October 2026. Photo: Blockchain Ireland.

Patrick Connolly of Accenture posed the question of who controls an AI agent with a wallet. Aidan Larkin of Asset Reality brought financial crime into the programme. Those questions belong beside the technology, because identity, permissions and accountability determine whether anyone can trust it. I explored the same connection in Digital Identity Is the Next Payment Network.

Richard Murphy of Fidelity's FCAT Europe had a particularly useful title: “The Technology Is Not The Point”. It is a good test for the whole industry. What gets cheaper, faster or more accessible? What becomes safer? Who benefits?

Katie Ferriter on stage at the Sugar Club. Photo: Macdara Molloy on LinkedIn.

The Central Bank's Mícheál O'Keeffe supplied the clearest explanation of the settlement problem in his published opening remarks:

Recording an asset is only half the transaction. The payment has to arrive, ownership has to transfer with legal certainty, and someone has to remain accountable when things go wrong. His speech puts those requirements at the centre of the discussion. The Central Bank's March discussion paper develops the argument across markets, funds and payments.

Much of Ireland's advantage comes from being part of a larger market. MiCA gives authorised crypto-asset service providers a route to operate across the EU under a common framework. That makes the quality of the Irish operation, and its ability to serve customers across borders, more valuable than the licence alone.

Supervision is evolving. On 9 October, the Council agreed key elements of its negotiating position on market integration and supervision, including direct ESMA supervision for the most significant cross-border crypto-asset service providers. This is a negotiating position, not a completed transfer of supervision.

Ireland should engage confidently with that direction. Our case should rest on the people, institutions and expertise located here. A business built around regulatory convenience is vulnerable to a change in the rules. A business built around customers and capabilities has a stronger foundation.

The rules are also changing what platforms can offer. ESMA's 8 October opinion calls for remaining exposures to non-MiCA-compliant stablecoins to be addressed within three months, with limited services allowed to support an orderly exit. That points to 8 January 2027, rather than an open-ended transition.

Against that backdrop, Qivalis deserves attention. Its May announcement brought together 37 banks across fifteen countries to develop a euro stablecoin, with Bank of Ireland and AIB joining the consortium. The proposal sought Dutch electronic money institution authorisation and targeted a launch in the second half of 2026. Those are plans and milestones, not evidence that a live product has already reached scale.

The public infrastructure has moved too. Pontes launched on 21 September, linking market DLT platforms to Eurosystem services so wholesale tokenised transactions can settle in central bank money. Appia is the longer-term initiative for the European tokenised ecosystem. The digital euro addresses a separate retail payments question. They should not be treated as interchangeable projects.

For Ireland, the opportunity is to connect these developments to a financial services industry already operating internationally. The government's Ireland for Finance Vision 2030 includes a Digital Assets Industry Group and legislative reviews to support tokenisation. The value will come from turning those commitments into rules that firms can use.

From the summit: Read Garrett Cassidy's account of Ireland's opportunity to help shape Europe's on-chain future.

I started building on-chain in 2015, the same year Blockchain Ireland was founded. At AID:Tech, the work centred on digital identity and traceable payments: being able to establish who someone was, what they were entitled to, and whether a payment reached its intended destination.

That experience shapes how I think about NestiFi, where we build a white-label AI wealth platform for credit unions and community financial institutions. The conversations now include crypto, stablecoins and tokenised real-world assets alongside savings and wealth. The difficult questions are familiar: who holds the assets, how are people protected, and does the product solve a problem they actually have?

I wrote about the cooperative opportunity in Credit Unions Have a Stablecoin Advantage. The lesson applies here too. Technology becomes useful when an institution people already trust can deliver it responsibly. A regulatory framework helps, but product design, permissions and consumer protection still have to be worked through.

The map shows depth. It does not mean the work is finished.

Start with talent. The Web3 skills and talent report from Technology Ireland ICT Skillnet, DCU and ATU makes a practical case for industry-led training, micro-credentials and closer links between education and employers. The skills gap extends beyond developers to legal, commercial and community roles.

Then give firms clearer answers on tax, accounting, ownership and smart contracts. The Central Bank's summit remarks describe legal certainty as a connected chain. If the token, the register and the contract do not line up, firms end up running parallel systems, and much of the promised efficiency disappears.

Capital matters as well. A promising company needs more than a place on a map: it needs customers, patient investment and a route to international scale. Ireland should be as deliberate about helping indigenous businesses grow as it is about attracting large institutions.

Bringing the ecosystem together at the Sugar Club. Photo: Mark Browne on LinkedIn.

Finally, we need a strong voice in Europe while the rules and infrastructure are being shaped. Hosting an important part of the financial system brings a responsibility to help improve it.

That is work Blockchain Ireland can keep doing through its working groups, events and research. The map and graphic are living resources, not a finished census. If your organisation belongs on them, submit a listing.

Ireland already has much of the expertise this transition needs. The next step is to make it easier for that expertise to become useful products, stronger companies and better financial services.

If you found this analysis valuable, subscribe to Synaptic Finance and connect with me on LinkedIn for weekly deep dives at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and the future of finance.