Yanis Varoufakis to Headline Web3 Summit 26 as Leading Voices Gather to Reclaim Digital Freedom in Berlin

Yanis Varoufakis - economist, political thinker, and one of the world's most outspoken critics of concentrated economic and technological power will headline Web3 Summit 2026 in Berlin. He joins Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot, among the leading voices gathering to advance privacy, self-sovereignty, and the future of user-centric decentralised technology.

BERLIN, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Web3 Summit 2026 today announced a wave of headline speakers for its return to Funkhaus Berlin on 18 and 19 June 2026. Billed as a festival for digital freedom, the Summit will bring together leading voices in economics, decentralised infrastructure, platform critique and Web3 culture.

Organised by the Web 3.0 Technologies Foundation, the Summit will convene artists, founders, technologists, and cultural thinkers to examine how privacy, digital sovereignty and decentralised usability can move from principle to practice. The speaker selection aims to deepen that conversation at a moment when public concern over centralised digital infrastructure, platform power and the erosion of privacy continue to grow.

Economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot and Kusama Gavin Wood, will join the Summit's programme alongside Joan Westenberg, Friedrike Ernst and Amir Taaki, as it explores how technology can be built around people and not platforms.

"Web3 Summit is not your run-of-the-mill tech conference – it's a rally for digital freedom, and this year it arrives at a defining moment. Europe is debating chat control and Germany is pushing back against mass scanning of private messages. Surveillance is the default. At a time when platform extraction and dependency define most people's digital lives, we're bringing together the critics, builders and pioneers who are actually changing that - not in theory, but in practice," said Thomas Fecker Boxler, Managing Director of the Web3 Foundation.

Vaourfakis will bring a controversial, political and economic lens to the question of who owns and governs digital systems shaping everyday life. Wood, one of the originators of Web3, will speak to the technical and philosophical foundations of a user-controlled internet. And to ground the programme in Web3 culture and practice, the Summit will also feature Joan Westenberg, writer and technology critic, Friederike Ernst, co-founder of Gnosis, and Amir Taaki, cypherpunk, early Bitcoin developer and privacy-tech pioneer.

Westenberg offers cultural commentary on platform dependency and what it means to be human online. Ernst connects the Summit's themes of privacy and self-sovereignty to the practical challenge of making decentralisation usable, drawing on her work across Gnosis Chain, Safe and the broader self-custody ecosystem. Taaki represents Web3's radical roots: cryptography, free software, and resistance to centralised control, a thread that runs through Berlin's own history of hacker culture and political experimentation.

For the first time, Web3 Summit put these voices in the same room – critics of concentrated power, builders of decentralised infrastructure, cultural observers, and cyberpunk pioneers – to confront one of the defining questions of our time: who controls our digital future?

As part of Berlin Blockchain Week, Web3 Summit 2026 will put Web3 values into practice through talks, workshops, activations and open collaboration, with an evolving line-up built around openness, participation and experimentation. That same focus on Web3 values extends to the event's ticketing: tickets with crypto payment are now available through a newly built ticketing app powered by the Polkadot blockchain.

Programme details and tickets are available at the event website.

About the Web3 Summit: The Web3 Summit is a community-driven gathering for people advocating for a more open, decentralised and user-controlled internet. It brings together developers, researchers, founders and creators to share ideas, test new approaches and advance practical Web3 technologies. The Web3 Summit 2026 will take place at Funkhaus Berlin on 18 and 19 June 2026.

About the Web3.0 Technologies Foundation: The Foundation's mission is to nurture cutting-edge applications for decentralised web software protocols and help deliver a fairer internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny.

For further information or to request media accreditation contact:

Hayley Watkins 
Web3 Foundation 
press@web3.foundation

Afsa Umutesi
Web3 Summit
aumutesi@diligence.com
+256 783 669 019