# From Pilot to Production: The Institutional Path Onchain | Clare Adelgren (EY) at ETHConf

- Channel: [ETHGlobal](https://streameth.org/ethglobal)
- Date: 2026-07-09
- Duration: 16:57
- Topics: EY, Clare Adelgren, ETHConf, institutional adoption, pilot to production, blockchain, tokenization, digital assets, RWAs, real world assets, infrastructure, enterprise, production readiness, trust, governance, compliance, controls, interoperability, legacy systems, privacy, confidentiality, selective disclosure, public blockchain, regulation, industrialization, settlement, liquidity, business value, auditability, risk management, banks, World Economic Forum, execution, scale, onchain
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-hSjGoT8UBsQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSjGoT8UBsQ

## Description

In this talk, Clare Adelgren, global blockchain leader at EY, explores the institutional path from pilot to production onchain, arguing the title captures exactly where the market sits today and why she is optimistic. She opens with a historical analogy: at the dawn of railroads people fixated on the trains (speed, cargo, destinations), but the bigger story turned out to be the rail network and how that infrastructure reshaped entire economies. Similarly, the car alone did not create modern transport; that took roads, safety standards, and institutions around the rules. She draws the parallel to blockchain, where for years attention centered on cryptocurrencies and tokenomics as the first vehicles on the rails, but the biggest shift now is toward the rails themselves, the infrastructure for moving assets, settling value, and coordinating trust in a programmable way, plus the rules and standards needed to operate at scale.

Clare contrasts earlier institutional conversations (framed as experimentation, pilots, proofs of concept, consortia, and controlled off-chain or hybrid models that let institutions explore without full commitment) with 2026, where outlooks from the World Economic Forum onward describe a broad shift from experiment to enterprise-grade deployment, with major banks shipping products, regulators drawing clearer lines, and a growing pipeline of real world assets queued for issuance and servicing. The question has shifted from whether the technology works to whether institutions can operationalize it at scale in a trusted, governable, compliant, and valuable way. She argues this moment feels different not just because of regulation reducing uncertainty, but because technology maturity, workable economics, improving privacy, and serious interoperability are aligning at once. Framing technology as table stakes and institutional readiness as the real unlock, she says the next wave will be defined by industrialization rather than innovation, embedding blockchain into real operating models. She lays out five pillars of production readiness: trust and governance (accountability and aligned participants), compliance and controls (auditability, risk management, regulatory scrutiny), interoperability with legacy systems, privacy and confidentiality (selective disclosure and privacy on public blockchains, a major EY investment), and measurable business value rather than innovation theater. She closes that the next phase belongs to institutions that move from curiosity to capability and from experiments to execution.

00:00 Introduction
00:46 Why Clare Is Optimistic About the Path
01:00 The Railroad Analogy
01:32 Why the Car Alone Did Not Create Transport
02:18 Parallels to Blockchain Today
02:45 The Shift Toward the Rails Themselves
03:13 How Institutional Conversations Used to Look
03:51 Why That Caution Made Sense
04:38 How the Conversation Changed by 2026
05:18 Banks, Regulators, and the RWA Pipeline
05:51 The Question Has Shifted From Can It Work
06:25 Why This Moment Feels Different
07:01 Why Regulation Is Not the Whole Story
07:22 How Maturity, Economics, and Interoperability Align
08:01 EY's Long-Held View on Scale Adoption
08:39 Why Technology Is Only Table Stakes
09:27 From Technical Feasibility to Institutional Operability
10:03 Why the Next Wave Is Industrialization
10:30 What Production Readiness Really Means
11:01 Pillar One: Trust and Governance
11:26 Pillar Two: Compliance and Controls
11:57 Pillar Three: Interoperability With Legacy Systems
12:25 Pillar Four: Privacy and Confidentiality
13:08 Pillar Five: Measurable Business Value
14:03 Institutional-Grade Onchain Infrastructure
14:32 What It Means for Institutional Leaders
15:05 Why This Is an Execution Phase
15:31 Why Operationalizing Beats Talking About Innovation
15:57 Why This Is Just the Beginning
16:35 Closing

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