2026-11-04 –, Lightning Stage
Finance and computing have both been shaped by tail events that cut across systems thought to be separate. Many of the standards and safeguards we still rely on today grew out of the responses to those events. This talk follows a few of those episodes, then brings the question to Ethereum: where could similar correlations appear, how might we identify them, and what could we do to mitigate them?
This talk will explore real-world cases where one event caused things that appeared independent to move or fail together, and what changed afterwards. It then turns to Ethereum and asks whether its combination of programmable value and cryptographic verification gives us new ways to respond to correlated events.
It is aimed at researchers, academics, infrastructure specialists and institutions that already study correlation and resilience in complex systems. Ethereum has its own versions of these questions, and studying them as a community will benefit from perspectives from other fields.
Thomas Humphreys works on the Funding Coordination team at the Ethereum Foundation, focused on capital formation and sustainable funding mechanisms that strengthen the network's long-term resilience. Previously, he was a two-time founder in identity and payments, with a background in trading, portfolio management, and security tooling.