“Real World. Real Movement” — the message the organizers chose for CONVICTION 2026 sounds like a slogan at first. But after two days at Thiskyhall Sala, we read it as a challenge: if your technology has not yet touched real money, real assets, and a real operating process, then it is still living on a slide.

That is why IABER took part in CONVICTION 2026, held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

CONVICTION 2026 — the scale of a national meeting point

The forum's numbers show how far the market has matured:

  • More than 150 domestic and international speakers
  • More than 26,000 registrations
  • More than 100 businesses in the exhibition area
  • Around 65 million impressions across media channels
  • More than 210 partners and sponsors, including TRON, AWS, OKX, Solana and BytePlus

What stands out is not the numbers, but how the programme was split in two: one day for Blockchain and Digital Assets, one day for Artificial Intelligence. The decade's two largest technology waves placed side by side, in the same hall, in front of the same audience.

The intersection: where blockchain meets AI

Read separately, they look like two unrelated conferences. Placed side by side, three points of intersection stand out clearly:

Blockchain solves the trust problem. AI solves the speed problem. One produces a transparent, undeniable, auditable ledger. The other processes volumes of data and decisions that humans cannot keep up with. A digital financial market needs both — without trust, speed becomes risk; without speed, trust is not enough to compete.

Agentic commerce needs a payment layer that AI can operate on its own. Once AI agents begin executing transactions themselves, traditional payment infrastructure — designed for a human pressing a button — becomes a bottleneck. This is why stablecoins, cross-border payments and multi-chain interoperability discussed on Day 1 bear directly on everything discussed on Day 2.

On-chain data is one of the rare sources of clean data for AI. While most businesses still wrestle with fragmented data, blockchain data is structured, public and immutable by design — an ideal foundation for analytical models and automated risk-management systems.

IABER provides VIP account solutions and trading capital support on international exchanges, serving professional traders, quantitative funds, market makers, KOLs and businesses that need proof of financial capability.

In other words, most of IABER's clients run systems, not emotions. And they are precisely the group the Agentic AI wave reaches first.

Three things IABER took away from CONVICTION 2026

First, infrastructure comes before applications. The sessions on AI infrastructure for agentic systems showed that the biggest barrier for Vietnamese businesses today is not the model, but clean data, systems integration and the ability to deploy at scale.

Second, “human-in-the-loop” remains mandatory in finance. The more automation there is, the more you need a stopping point decided by a person. For services involving capital and margin, transparency of process matters no less than processing speed.

Third, AI is redefining productivity, not replacing expertise. The people who gain most from AI in trading are not beginners but those who already have a system — because AI amplifies the existing process, strengths and weaknesses alike.

What comes next for IABER

Attending CONVICTION 2026 is part of IABER's long-term direction: to accompany Vietnam's digital asset ecosystem on the infrastructure and operations side, rather than chasing the market's short-term waves.

In the period ahead, IABER continues to focus on three core solution groups: trading capital support for traders and quantitative funds, proof of funds (POF) services, and risk-management services with automated threshold monitoring — the foundations that let professional trading teams scale in a controlled way.

Our thanks to the CONVICTION 2026 organizing committee, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee, VCCI, EIC, HBA and Coin98 for creating a high-quality space for dialogue for Vietnam's technology and digital finance community.

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