Stratosphere, Pudgy Penguins, and Streamex hosted a private Founders Table VIP dinner in New York City during ETHConf 2026 and NYC Tech Week. It brought together leaders across digital assets, tech, AI, traditional finance, and institutional capital. The invite-only dinner took place on June 9th. It gathered a curated room of founders, operators, funds, C-level executives, and institutional leaders for an intimate evening of dinner and conversation.
Who Actually Attended This Specific Dinner
Guests in attendance included leaders from Citi, BitMine, BitGo, Mirae Asset Securities USA, Experian, Pyth Network, Space and Time, MegaETH, B3, Stable, Antler, Delphi Digital, Fun, Linera, Vanta Trading, Streamex, PolyData, Horizen Labs, World Foundation, Zipcode, OpenLedger, Onyx, Definitive, and Notalone Ventures, among others. That guest list spans traditional finance, crypto-native infrastructure, credit and data companies, and venture capital simultaneously, rather than being narrowly drawn from a single sector.
What This Format Actually Means as an Event Structure
It's intentionally simple: a selected guest list, a private room, and no stage agenda. That deliberate absence of formal programming distinguishes the dinner from a typical conference side-event with scheduled panels or presentations. It instead prioritizes unstructured, direct conversation among a curated group.
What Each Host Organization Actually Brought to the Room
The dinner was hosted by Stratosphere with Pudgy Penguins and Streamex, each contributing a distinct piece to the room. Stratosphere brought its network across founders, operators, investors, and institutional teams. Pudgy Penguins added one of the strongest consumer brands and communities in digital assets. Streamex brought the institutional and real-world asset side of the conversation, with its focus on tokenized gold and commodity markets.
What Stratosphere's CEO Said About the Broader Industry Moment
Hassan Shaikh, CEO of Stratosphere, said he's optimistic about the next phase of digital assets, around the tokenization of commodities. That connects the evening's institutional and RWA-focused conversation directly to a broader thesis about where the industry's next growth phase is headed.
Why This Dinner Follows an Established, Repeated Pattern
The Stratosphere team and its CEO have continued to build this series around major industry conferences. It's not a one-time event. After previous editions during the Digital Asset Summit and Consensus, the New York dinner continued the same underlying idea: high-quality rooms, selected attendance, and conversations that are difficult to recreate on a conference floor.
What This Event Signals for Stratosphere's Positioning
For Stratosphere, the dinner reinforces the company's position as an ecosystem partner for leading brands across tech, finance, and digital assets. It uses the recurring Founders Table format as a consistent mechanism for building and maintaining relationships across those distinct sectors over time, rather than through a single conference presence alone.
Bringing together traditional finance, crypto infrastructure, and consumer brands in one curated setting like this reflects the same cross-sector relationship-building approach seen in mb.io's multi-partner gold tokenisation programme. Both illustrate how institutional crypto initiatives increasingly depend on relationships spanning well beyond a single industry vertical.
Glossary
- Founders Table: A private, invite-only dinner series hosted around major industry conferences, deliberately structured without a formal stage agenda.
- RWA (Real-World Asset): A category of tokenized products representing ownership of tangible or traditional financial assets, such as gold or commodities.
- Institutional leader: A senior executive or decision-maker representing a large financial institution, fund, or established company rather than a purely crypto-native startup.
Disclaimer
Read this as informational content only; it does not constitute financial or investment advice. Confirm current details directly through official Stratosphere announcements.
