DGFI 2026: Local Currency, Global Rails: The Opportunity Behind GEL₮
Day 1 Strategic Conversation panel at DGFI 2026 in Tbilisi on Local Currency, Global Rails, sharing the stage with Giorgi Agladze of Stable.ge by Tether, Rati Morchiladze of Foresight, and Nikoloz Beradze of VS1 Finance.
On Day 1 of DGFI 2026 in Tbilisi, I joined the Strategic Conversation panel titled Local Currency, Global Rails: The Opportunity Behind GEL₮. The event screen listed me as Gui Bibeau, Lead Product Engineer at Solana Foundation, next to Giorgi Agladze, CEO at Stable.ge by Tether, Rati Morchiladze, CEO and CIO at Foresight, and Nikoloz Beradze, Co-Founder at VS1 Finance. The question on the table was practical for an emerging financial hub: what changes when a local currency like the Georgian Lari moves onto programmable, high-throughput settlement rails?
My contribution centered on the engineering and institutional architecture behind the Solana Developer Platform and Token Extensions. I focused on how regulated issuers configure transfer restrictions, confidential balances, and role-based minting authorities while keeping access to global liquidity. We treated local stablecoins as payment and treasury infrastructure rather than speculative instruments, and looked at how domestic payments and cross-border B2B settlement change when local currency can clear quickly with compliance controls built in.
Photos by Mariam (@mariamgoya) via Telegram, 2026-10-30.