Welcome from the Chairs of BRAINS 2026
It is with great pleasure to welcome you to the 8th Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services, that will be held on October 13 – 16, 2026 in Florence, Italy.
Decentralized technologies (Web3, Blockchain, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Distributed Storage and Computation as IPFS) have started to disrupt multiple domains, including finance and payments, but also networks, computing, supply chain, identity management, and Artificial Intelligence with decentralized learning.
The BRAINS conference is dedicated to these advances that could make the world of networks and services more secure while enabling new distributed business models.
This year, a new DeFi track is open to both technically oriented and economics-oriented papers. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary work that combines blockchain protocols, smart contract engineering, and DeFi market design, as well as empirical and theoretical studies on crypto-economics and financial innovation.
BRAINS 2026 will address the challenges and issues raised in the design of future networks in all their dimensions, offering to its attendees a variety of state-of-the-art sessions, including technical presentations, keynotes, demonstrations and panel discussions.
The conference aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from all over the world to explore the opportunities and cross-disciplinary challenges of blockchains and Distributed ledger technologies for industry, academia, governments and enterprises. With this vision, the conference will look beyond the current state of the art and promote the advances of these disruptive technologies. The single-track structure of the conference guarantees appropriate presentation of the technical papers and demos.
We are honored to organize BRAINS 2026 in the beautiful city of Florence and we are looking forward to your contributions to the continued success of the conference!
Emmanuel Bertin
(Orange Innovation, France )
Antonella Del Pozzo
(CEA List, Paris-Saclay University, France)
Philip Raschke
(TU Berlin, Germany)
Francesco Tiezzi
(University of Florence, Italy)