THE FINTECH LAB
Rigorous research and bold insights shaping tomorrow’s financial landscape.
2026 Featured Research Presented by
Thank you to the thought leaders who submitted cutting-edge research from around the world!
DC Fintech Week received dozens of paper submissions from international agencies, law firms, regulators, entrepreneurs and more. Below are those we thought deserved an extra shout out, with eye out to quality, geography, diversity of opinion, and varying stages of career development of authors.
2026 Winning Papers
- Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Evidence from Financial Markets , Alexander Copestake, Cage Englander, Maria Soledad Martinez Peria, Germán Villegas-Bauer
- The Last Mile of the Unified Ledger: Connecting Bank-Internal Tokenised Deposits to Project Agorá , Kyungeun Kim
- Causal Evidentiary Governance: A Verifiable Framework for Auditing Fairness in Credit-Scoring AI , Samah Kareem, Baris Celiktas
- Modern Foundations of Personal Finance: Literacy and Infrastructure in the Digital Economy , Molly Woodman, Adrian Wall, Emily Ekshian, Maghan Lusk
- The Compatibility of Permissionless Networks and Financial Integrity: A Practical Guide for Financial Institutions , Rebecca Rettig, Michael Mosier, Omid Malekan
2026 Featured Research
- When Law Executes Code: The Particularity Problem in Stablecoin Seizure , Matthew Ramírez
- Spillovers of Digitization , Saqib Hussain
- The Quantum Clock Is Ticking: Financial Stability and the Regulation of Quantum-Vulnerable Digital Assets , Lee Reiners
- Signed, Not Seen: The Evidence Nobody Is Required to Carry , Alexander Barrett
- Tokenisation of Real-World Assets: Towards Embedded Crypto Finance , Dirk Andreas Zetzsche, Ross P. Buckley, Douglas W. Arner
- Could Instant Payments or Stablecoins Be the Answer to 24/7 Margin Calls? , David W. DeCarlo
- Cryptoasset Climate Accountability in the United Kingdom: The Material-Connection Model , Tonika Stephenson
- Governing Agentic Financial Services: Interaction Models, Functional Architecture, and Initial Regulatory Considerations , Guillermo Galicia Rabadan, Harish Natarajan