With over 861 million users globally, the crypto industry is entering a new phase: adoption at scale. In this context, MERGE Madrid 2025, held at the iconic Palacio de Cibeles from October 7–9, positions itself as a must-attend event to understand, anticipate, and lead the future of digital finance and blockchain technology.
In its third edition, MERGE will welcome over 3,000 attendees, 500 international organizations, and more than 200 high-profile speakers, ranging from central banks and financial institutions to leading blockchain protocols, emerging startups, and global corporations already leveraging Web3 as a strategic innovation driver.
Will Spanish Banks Launch Their Own Stablecoins?
Stablecoins are emerging as blockchain’s true killer app, creating real utility even for non-crypto-native users. In France and Germany, Société Générale and Deutsche Bank have already launched corporate stablecoin projects. In the U.S., banking consortia are discussing joint stablecoin initiatives to enhance efficiency and scalability.
MERGE Madrid 2025 will be the ideal stage to analyze and debate these developments, bringing together traditional finance and native Web3 ecosystems. Confirmed participants include Santander, BBVA, BNP Paribas, TowerBank, Wenia (Bancolombia) and many others.
A Full Week of Vision, Tech, and Web3 Culture
This year, MERGE Madrid expands into a multi-layered experience, built around a weeklong program connecting every part of the ecosystem.
October 7: Private roundtables with regulators at MERGE Institutional, followed by a VIP Cocktail.
October 8–9: The main conference, the heart of the event, will explore business strategies, global regulation, digital finance, immersive art, cultural experiences, and Web3 adoption frameworks.
October 10: MERGE Tech Summit, a full day of developer bootcamps, workshops, and technical sessions.
October 11–12: The weekend Hackathon, where innovation comes to life.
This structure ensures representation from decision-makers and regulators to the developers building the future from code. MERGE transforms Madrid into a real bridge between institutional, technical, and creative worlds, shaping the future of the token economy.
The Bridge Between Latin America and Europe
MERGE Madrid strengthens its role as a strategic connection point between Europe and Latin America, uniting institutions, governments, and businesses from both regions around Web3 innovation.
Previous editions have welcomed institutions like the Central Bank of Brazil, Argentina’s Central Bank, Argentina’s National Securities Commission, El Salvador’s Digital Assets Commission, the European Banking Authority, and governments from Madrid and Buenos Aires, many of whom are returning in 2025.
This transatlantic connection takes on special significance as MERGE coincides with Hispanic Heritage Week, positioning Madrid as a capital of Ibero-American collaboration in decentralized economics.
A World-Class Speaker Lineup
MERGE is growing in every direction – and its speaker agenda is no exception. The 2025 edition features over 200 top experts and international C-level leaders, curated to provide a 360° view of the Web3 ecosystem:
Traditional financial institutions: Key figures include Coty de Monteverde (Banco Santander), Francisco Maroto (BBVA), David Cunningham (Citi), Gabriel Campa (TowerBank), and Pablo Arboleda Niño (Bancolombia) — all leaders in institutional investment and crypto asset adoption.
Native Web3 projects: Influential voices such as Staci Warden (CEO at Algorand Foundation), Cassie Craddock (Managing Director UK & Europe at Ripple), Robby Yung (CEO at Animoca Brands), Eric Piscini (CEO at Hashgraph), Charles d’Haussy (CEO at dYdX Foundation), and Robert Drost (CEO at Eigen Foundation) will be present, driving infrastructure, DeFi, and the convergence of AI and Web3.
Major corporations and fintech: The program includes executives such as Damu Winston (Global Head of Web3 Innovation at Amazon), Esteban Sadurni (Director of Digital Assets and Blockchain at Checkout.com), Michael Higgins (International CEO at Hidden Road), Dotun Rominiyi (Technology Leader at London Stock Exchange Group), and Jaime de Mora (CTO for Startups & Unicorns at Microsoft EMEA), showcasing the strategic and technical role of digital transformation.
Top-Tier Industry Support
Great events attract great partners. This year, MERGE is backed by leading organizations such as: BingX, Bit2Me, Ripple, ATH21, Boerse Stuttgart Digital, ikigii by Towerbank, Arbitrum, Asensi Abogados, Avenia, BSV Blockchain, Chainlink, CryptoMKT, EigenLayer, Finreg360, Lace, Notabene, Parfin, Stakely, Taurus, TRM Labs, and WOW!?
Bitcoin has struggled to maintain its upward momentum since reaching a new all-time high of $122,054 on July 14. At press time, the leading cryptocurrency trades around the $113,000 price level, marking a nearly 7.4% decline over the past 19 days.
Due to this pullback, the percentage of BTC’s supply in profit has declined, signaling waning investor confidence. As the new trading month runs its course, this trend could be a precursor to steeper price corrections.
Bitcoin’s Profitability Falls to 41-Day Low
According to Glassnode, BTC’s Percent Supply in Profit fell to a 41-day low of 91.71% on August 1. This metric measures the percentage of BTC’s circulating supply currently held at a profit. It measures market sentiment, often peaking during euphoric rallies and falling as investor confidence wanes.
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When this metric falls, a growing portion of holders is either breaking even or recording losses. These market conditions historically coincide with periods of market consolidation or potential price corrections.
The recent decline to 91.71% suggests that the broader market is cooling off after weeks of upward price action. It reflects a shift in sentiment, as fewer holders remain comfortably in profit.
This could dampen short-term buying pressure and leave BTC at risk of a further dip over the next few trading sessions.
Bitcoin Faces Key Test as Futures Traders Flip Bearish
BTC’s long/short ratio has tilted toward bearish territory, confirming that the bullish conviction among leveraged traders might also be fading. At press time, this stands below one at 0.96.
The long/short metric measures the proportion of long bets to short ones in an asset’s futures market. A ratio above one signals more long positions than short ones. This indicates a bullish sentiment, as most traders expect the asset’s value to rise.
On the other hand, a long/short ratio below 1 means that more traders are betting on the asset’s price to decline than those expecting it to rise.
With fewer traders willing to bet aggressively on continued upside, BTC may find it difficult to regain momentum unless fresh catalysts emerge.
Bitcoin’s Next Move: Breakdown to $111,855 or Breakout Above $120,000?
Bitcoin’s daily trading volume has dropped from its July peaks, signaling reduced market participation. If profit-taking strengthens, the king coin could potentially decline toward $111,855.
However, if new demand enters the market, the coin’s price could regain strength and climb toward $116,952. A breach of this resistance is key before the coin can rally back above $120,000.
According to data from Precedence Research, the Web3 market valuation is expected to reach over $99 billion in 2034. However, despite improvements in decentralized finance and smart contracts, Web3 development can still feel like building software in the dark. Developers often find themselves with fragmented tools, running local testnets, praying public ones don’t crash. Most of the time, they usually endure workflows that feel primitive compared to modern Web 2 stacks.
Tools like GitHub, Docker, and Vercel have made Web2 development slick, collaborative, and scalable. But in Web3? Developers still rely on disjointed toolchains. This is an inconvenience and also a barrier to adoption. Every smart contract needs to be tested. Every dApp needs reliable infrastructure. However, the lack of unified tooling introduces risk, slows time-to-market, and increases expenses.
Enter BuildBear Labs. According to Emmanuel Antony, CTO and Co-Founder of BuildBear Labs, “BuildBear Labs provides a unified, integrated ecosystem that simplifies fragmented Web3 development, streamlining collaboration across smart contracts, frontend, backend, SDKs, and off-chain services to accelerate development cycles.”
The Issues Web2 Devs Face When Entering Web3
The Web3 dream is attracting developers from around the world, especially those with experience in Web2 development. They bring strong backend, frontend, and systems expertise, but often face a broken onboarding experience when they enter Web3.
Within the Web3 sector, there is no standard CI/CD pipeline, and testnets are unreliable, constantly breaking or being deprecated.
There is also a lack of collaboration tools for teams to debug, deploy, and iterate together. Sometimes, security testing is outsourced, inconsistent, or comes too late.
This mismatch between Web2 expectations and Web3 tooling realities is frustrating and expensive. Many projects burn hundreds of thousands just trying to ship a secure minimum viable product (MVP).
Some projects take over 8 months and cost upwards of $525,000, with $450,000 spent on testing. Around 40% of dev time is lost to fragmented workflows and unreliable environments that fail to mimic the mainnet.
BuildBear Labs: Bringing GitHub-Level DevOps to Web3
BuildBear.io is building the first full-stack DevOps platform built for the decentralized world. This solution is more than just a testing environment, but a 360 Web3 ecosystem that allows developers to take their project from 0 to 100, ideation through to launch. It helps developers create, test, and deploy smart contract-based applications with the same ease and power they enjoy in Web2.
Furthermore, BuildBear Labs provides persistent, real-world blockchain sandboxes, which are private environments that mimic mainnet conditions. These sandboxes give developers deterministic control, fast feedback loops, and a place to test with teammates in real time.
But a better testnet is not the only solution BuildBear Labs provides. Most blockchain development tools today only handle individual parts of the development process. For example, some are a local runtime like Hardhat, or a contract debugger like Tenderly. However, BuildBear Labs provides a 360° ecosystem, combining:
Replacing Fragile Toolchains with Integrated Infrastructure
To understand the value of BuildBear Labs, it is worth examining what a typical Web3 team deals with today. First, they usually set up a local Hardhat or Foundry node.
Then, they configure scripts for deployment and manually fund dev accounts via flaky public faucets. The process also involves testing features across multiple chains and constantly redeploying and resetting testnets. Finally, it needs multiple tools for debugging and tracing.
Now compare that to the BuildBear Labs flow. Developers can spin up a private sandbox environment and automatically provision faucet tokens and RPCs.
They can invite teammates to interact and debug in real time. With BuildBear Labs, you can integrate with your existing GitHub CI/CD pipeline and extend its functionality via plugins. Additionally, you can test and ship with confidence on any of 700+ supported chains.
Every part of BuildBear Labs’ architecture is aimed at solving a major dev pain point:
Dev Need
Old Way
BuildBear Approach
Testing dApps across chains
Juggling multiple testnets
One dashboard for 700+ chains
Persistent state
Manual resets every session
Save and resume where you left off
CI/CD integration
None
Native GitHub/Jenkins support
Token faucets
Unreliable or rate-limited
Instant faucet access per sandbox
Debugging tools
Fragmented tooling
Built-in explorer, trace, fuzz, scan
Collaboration
Siloed, local-only
Invite teams to the shared sandbox
For investors and builders alike, the economics of BuildBear Labs are compelling.
Their ecosystem features an average cost reduction of up to $300K per project. This is due to testnet replacement, fewer audit bugs, and shorter development cycles.
Developers can also launch 3 to 4 months faster, thanks to better collaboration and automation. Also, they can mitigate security risks early, before mainnet deployment, and reduce downtime, which can cost $ 5,000+ per day in DeFi revenue.
BuildBear Labs operates in two sectors, which are blockchain development infrastructure and enterprise-grade DevOps tooling.
The total dev tools market is expected to reach $19.7 billion by 2032, and Web3-native tooling is projected to account for over $3 billion of that. With over 658,000 developers projected to be building in Web3 by 2032, the demand for tools like BuildBear is only accelerating.
Inside BuildBear Labs’ Developer Stack
BuildBear Labs is a deeply engineered, cloud-native DevOps platform purpose-built for the Web3 era. From Phoenix Engine’s fault-tolerant testing to GitHub-native CI/CD pipelines, BuildBear offers every tool a developer needs to ship production-ready dApps safely and fast.
The EVM Sandbox
One of BuildBear Labs’ primary products is its Secure EVM Sandbox, powered by the Phoenix Engine. This is a customizable, forkable, and shareable blockchain environment that mirrors mainnet conditions without exposing your team to real-world costs or risk.
This isn’t a thin wrapper over Hardhat or Foundry. It is a fully integrated, scalable, persistent environment that supports team collaboration and debugging with advanced explorers.
There’s also token provisioning via an unlimited faucet. Furthermore, there is a Multi-Chain simulation and support for hybrid services, such as Chainlink VRF, Across Bridge, and account abstraction.
You can fork the state of any EVM-compatible chain, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea, Avalanche, Base, BSC, zkEVM, and more, at any block height. This gives developers a mirror of the mainnet, complete with contract state, balances, and historical data.
Unlike public testnets or local setups, BuildBear Labs gives teams full control over the chain environment. It provides them with custom configs, where they can define their own chain parameters. Developers can set the block time, gas limit, and consensus rules for specialized dev and QA workflows.
BuildBear lets you simulate future time for time-sensitive contracts. You can impersonate any on-chain user or contract. Sandboxes persist across sessions and CI jobs, so there is no need to reinitialize.
In decentralized teams, coordination is key. BuildBear Labs collaborative features bring everyone, from Solidity devs to frontend engineers, into the same room.
BuildBear Labs lets teams share sandboxes via a simple link, making collaboration with teammates or auditors easy. You can deploy a contract from one repository and test it from another, thanks to X-Team support. Hybrid workflows are fully supported, allowing contracts, SDKs, and UIs to interact in a single testing flow. Every new GitHub pull request can automatically trigger a fresh sandbox environment.
This kind of horizontal integration doesn’t exist in typical dev stacks. With BuildBear Labs, everyone contributes to the testbed, from frontend QA and protocol engineers to auditors and product managers.
Phoenix Engine
There’s also the Phoenix Engine, BuildBear Labs’ in-house chain simulation layer, which completely changes how devnets should operate. It enables complex simulations, such as cross-chain bridge logic, replay attacks, and performance profiling.
Feature
Phoenix Engine
State Recovery
Crash-proof environments that can restart in an identical state
RPC Flexibility
Switch service providers on the fly
Atomic Transactions
Guarantees consistency across reads/writes
Multi-user performance
Read-heavy ops don’t block others
Memory Optimization
Leaner than Anvil or Hardhat, ideal for CI pipelines
Multi-chain Forks
Run multiple independent forks in the same environment
CI/CD for Solidity
BuildBear makes continuous integration for smart contracts as easy as a GitHub YAML file.
Teams can automatically create new sandboxes for every pull request. They can run tests on forked chains using Foundry or Hardhat. Failed tests can be debugged directly from GitHub logs. Stateful sandboxes can be reused across test suites. Gas usage can be profiled inline.
BuildBear Labs supports over 45 Foundry cheat codes, allowing for advanced automation in contract testing, fuzzing, and deployment. And the experience is user-friendly. You click a GitHub link and land directly in a BuildBear explorer session, ready to inspect, trace, and fix bugs.
Plugin Architecture
Most dev tools are closed ecosystems. Not BuildBear Labs.
BuildBear Labs’ plugin system lets developers integrate services like Pimlico, Across Bridge, Blockscout, Chainlink VRF, and Gelato, as well as connect to external data or simulators. They can also run custom scripts to change state or impersonate users, and even trigger AI agents directly from Solidity using cheat codes.
This plugin-first mindset allows developers to create production-grade simulations directly from within their tests. Even if you want to test a Gnosis Safe recovery flow with VRF randomness on a bridged token, you can do that at BuildBear.
BuildBear Labs Explorer
Testing is only half the things developers do. Debugging, tracing, and understanding smart contract behavior is where teams win or lose real-world reliability.
BuildBear Labs Explorer gives developers a powerful toolkit for transaction analysis. It lets you monitor transactions in real-time across multiple explorers, such as BlockScout, Etherscan, and BuildBear Labs itself. You can track gas usage, including reverts and internal calls, to catch inefficiencies early.
For deeper debugging, it supports Sentio Tracer, Simbolik Debugger, and Foundry’s trace tools. It also integrates with external explorers, allowing you to view any transaction on platforms like Etherscan or BaseScan instantly.
Every environment logs interactions automatically, so QA teams and auditors can walk through historical sessions, test coverage, and contract behavior in production-like environments.
Faucet Access
BuildBear Labs provides unlimited faucet access to both native and ERC-20 tokens across all environments. No signups, no rate limits, no “out of funds” errors.
Just click, mint, and move on with testing. For teams simulating cross-chain dApps, DeFi flows, or staking mechanisms, this removes a major source of friction.
What Are the Benefits of BuildBear Labs Solutions?
Below, we will be discussing some of the benefits developers and teams can gain from using BuildBear Labs products and solutions.
Test Like It’s Mainnet Without the Risk
In real-world conditions, dApps interact with multiple services, tokens, and accounts in unpredictable ways. BuildBear Labs lets developers run multiple forks side by side and test production scenarios with plugins.
They can also simulate hybrid workflows and use custom cheat codes to shape execution paths and stress-test logic.
A Better Developer UX
Underneath all the power is a UX that feels smooth, familiar, and fast. You spend less time wiring up your tools and more time building actual features.
BuildBear Labs removes all the setup complexities. There’s no need to provision infrastructure, configure faucets, or manually spin up explorers. Forks come ready to go, with default balances and account impersonation so you can start testing instantly. Environments are persistent, linked, and fully replayable, while GitHub-native integrations ensure smooth, automated workflows without added friction.
A Strong Competitive Advantage
BuildBear Labs has a strong competitive advantage that is built on four layers, including a Phoenix Engine, a Plugin, CI/CD integrations, and a community.
BuildBear Labs’ infrastructure is anchored by the Phoenix Engine, a fault-tolerant testnet engine that supports state recovery and multi-fork simulation. It outperforms Anvil and Hardhat in memory efficiency, transaction atomicity, and concurrent performance. This makes it better for production-grade testing.
Its Plugin and Cheatcode Ecosystem gives developers unmatched flexibility. Teams can integrate off-chain services, simulators, or even AI agents directly into Solidity tests. This allows them to have complex scenario testing without leaving their development environment.
BuildBear Labs also fits into existing DevOps workflows. With native GitHub Actions support, smart contract teams can plug testing and deployment directly into their CI/CD pipelines.
There’s also a massive community behind BuildBear Labs. Developers continuously fork sandboxes, share test links, publish plugins, and improve documentation. This flywheel effect means the platform becomes more powerful with each new user. In other words, it will help increase adoption across the Web3 ecosystem.
Market Overview and Momentum For BuildBear Labs
EigenLayer’s ecosystem shows why BuildBear matters. The DIN team used BuildBear Labs’ sandboxes to test each protocol update in a stable, shared environment. During the Holesky Pectra upgrade delays, its resilience kept progress on track. As one developer put it, “BuildBear being up during the Holesky holdup allowed us to continue unimpeded.”
Since launching, BuildBear Labs has attracted users ranging from independent Solidity engineers to venture-backed L2s and infra startups. Its mix of scalability, flexibility, and collaboration tooling makes it uniquely suited for protocols shipping to the mainnet at high velocity.
BuildBear Labs has a diverse user base, including audit firms and protocol teams.
Protocol teams rely on the platform to simulate network upgrades, test gas optimizations, and run intensive fuzzing campaigns before shipping code to the mainnet. DeFi platforms use BuildBear Labs to build cross-chain integrations and test against real contract states by forking live networks.
Security firms and auditors benefit from BuildBear Labs’ precision testing environments to replicate bugs, trace vulnerabilities, and validate fixes. Early-stage dApp teams are also heavy users, using features like account abstraction support, Safe module testing, and plugin-based simulations from the start.
Even traditional enterprises entering Web3 are adopting BuildBear Labs. With GitHub-native CI/CD and DevOps compatibility, these teams can deploy and test smart contracts using familiar pipelines.
BuildBear is solving foundational issues that have slowed Web3 for years:
Pain Point
Legacy Approach
BuildBear Labs’ Solution
Testnet reliability
Public chains with/ downtime, spam, and faucet limits
Persistent, forkable private chains
CI/CD for Solidity
Manual scripting, flaky local setups
GitHub-native, scalable automation
Multi-chain testing
Snapshots or individual test scripts
Forks of any EVM chain at any block height
Debugging
Manual explorer hopping
Integrated explorer + advanced trace tools
Off-chain integrations
Manual mocking or skipped tests
Plugin system for hybrid scenarios
QA coordination
Screenshots and dev handoffs
Shareable sandboxes + team-ready UX
Strategic Advantage
The current EVM ecosystem is both vast and fragmented. Dozens of L2s, rollups, zkEVM chains, and appchains launch every quarter. Each introduces new environments, contract semantics, and cross-chain behaviors.
BuildBear Labs sits above this fragmentation, providing a unifying test and simulation layer across L1s like Ethereum and Gnosis. L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and zkEVM. Testnets like Sepolia, Holesky, bespoke forks, and new chains like Berachain, Linea, and Kava.
By doing so, it becomes a layer for standardizing development and automating tests across the modular blockchain stack. In the same way that GitHub standardized repo management or Postman streamlined API testing, BuildBear Labs can become the entry point for decentralized software development.
Final Thoughts
BuildBear Labs is changing how Web3 teams build, test, and deploy smart contracts. By providing a secure, stateful, and deeply customizable sandbox environment, it removes unreliable testnets and disconnected tooling. Whether you are a protocol developer fine-tuning gas usage, a dApp team, or an auditor validating a critical fix, BuildBear Labs provides the precision and flexibility modern blockchain development demands.
With CI/CD integrations, plugin support, advanced debugging tools, and the powerful Phoenix Engine, teams can ship faster and with greater confidence. BuildBear Labs stands out as the Web3 developer infrastructure layer that makes production-ready testing better. From American developers and startups to enterprises, it is the toolkit behind the next generation of secure and scalable decentralized applications.
