The NEXT Summit, organised by NEXT.io, returns to Valletta for its 2026 edition on 27–28 May at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, a 16th-century building that is set at the edge of the Valletta peninsula, overlooking the Grand Harbour. Malta has, over the past decade, built a substantial regulatory and corporate infrastructure around iGaming, and a significant portion of the summit’s target audience already has a professional or operational presence on the island.
The event is structured as an operator-led gathering, and its 2025 edition drew over 5,000 attendees, among them more than 1,200 C-level executives. The operator weighting roughly 40% of attendance, is a distinguishing feature that the organisers have built the event’s identity around. For suppliers, tech providers, and affiliates, that ratio shapes the calculus of attendance: the access to decision-makers with actual purchasing authority, rather than just fellow suppliers, is what drives repeat attendance year on year.
A Week That Extends Well Beyond Two Days
The main conference runs Thursday and Friday, 27–28 May. But the practical week begins two days earlier and stretches two days after. The full festival window runs from 25 to 30 May, and includes the main summit, several focused sub-summits, and a series of side events across Valletta and beyond.
This structure a short, dense conference core surrounded by days of satellite activity has started gaining traction since past few years and has become a standard pattern in the iGaming industry. The logic is functional. Two days of conference sessions alone cannot sustain the volume of meaningful meetings that a week of distributed events can. Spreading interactions across different formats and settings allows the same professionals to meet one other multiple times, in varying contexts, which tends to produce more durable professional relationships than a single expo floor conversation.
The Pre-Conference Programme
Sunday, 25 May
The week opens on Sunday with three things running in parallel. The golf tournament at Royal Malta Golf Club kicks off early morning at 07:30. The tournament is run in partnership with the iGaming Golf Club and is designed as a day that combines a competitive format with the kind of relaxed, extended interaction time that a conference floor rarely provides. Golf, like padel, has become a recurring format at iGaming events precisely because it delivers several uninterrupted hours of contact time with a small group, a format that suits relationship-building in a way that a thirty-minute networking session simply may not.
Also on Sunday: the AI Match Sessions Sunset Edition at Kora (19:00), which focuses on AI-driven matchmaking for professional meetings, and the Casino Guru Awards 2026 at Xara Lodge, recognising operators across the industry.
Monday, 26 May
The padel tournament runs from morning at 07:30 at IK Padel Village, followed by the pre-registration event at the Mediterranean Conference Centre at 19:00. The pre-registration event is worth noting for practical reasons: collecting a badge the evening before the conference opens means avoiding the queue that typically forms when the doors open on Day One. For anyone with morning meetings scheduled, it is a straightforward time management decision.
Also on Monday, a yoga and breathwork session runs from morning 08:00, led by Neil Agius a Maltese open-water swimmer who holds a world record in unassisted long-distance swimming. The session includes guided breathwork and an ice bath option. It is an unusual addition to a conference calendar, but in a week where the schedule can run from early morning to past midnight, the appeal of a structured physical reset is not hard to understand. It is not compulsory, and the organisers note that it may not be suitable for everyone.
The Sub-Summits: Focused Tracks Before the Main Event
One of the more distinctive features of the NEXT Summit week is the series of focused, single-topic sub-events called NEXT Focus that run in the days leading up to the main conference. These are held at the Phoenicia Malta hotel, just outside Valletta’s city gates.
NEXT Focus: Affiliate
A full-day summit on affiliate and performance marketing. The programme brings together operators, affiliates, networks, and tech providers through keynotes, panels, and workshops covering SEO, AI optimisation, compliance, and media buying. For affiliate professionals, a dedicated day with this specific focus tends to be more actionable than the broader content of the main conference.
NEXT Focus: Crypto
A half-day summit examining how digital assets from blockchain payments to tokenized loyalty systems are intersecting with iGaming operations, along with the compliance questions that come with them. Crypto’s role in iGaming has been expanding in regulated and grey markets alike, and the compliance dimension is increasingly what makes these conversations substantive rather than speculative.
NEXT Focus: Start-Up & Investment
A full-day event bringing together founders, operators, VCs, and investors for discussions, live deal clinics, and practical sessions on funding and scaling. The “Hot Seat” format where startups present directly to a panel of investors and senior operators has been a consistent feature of the NEXT Summit programming in previous years. It is a practical format: brief, direct, and with immediate feedback.
NEXT Focus: Prediction Markets
A half-day event on 25 May dedicated to prediction markets, one of the faster-growing financial instruments intersecting with gaming. It brings together operators, platforms, executives, and investors to discuss market direction, regulation, and commercial opportunity.
The Main Conference: 27-28 May
The two days of the main summit at the Mediterranean Conference Centre make up the core of the week. The programme includes CEO Hot Seat sessions and a chess challenge with Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion who has appeared at previous NEXT Summit editions. The chess segment sits somewhere between entertainment and content it is a crowd draw that also tends to generate some of the week’s more widely shared moments online.
Day One networking drinks begin at the MCC at 17:30, and Day Two networking drinks follow the same format at the same venue. These post-session evening events are where much of the informal deal-making tends to happen. By the end of Day One, attendees have generally identified the people they most need to speak with. The evening gives them a lower-pressure setting to do it.
The Closing Party Rave Cave
The closing party, called Rave Cave, takes place at the Mediterranean Conference Centre at 22:00 on the final conference day. It ends the official programming on a social note before the majority of delegates begin departing.
After the Conference: Showers 2026
Saturday, 30 May: Café del Mar Malta
The pool party Showers which has sold out for twelve consecutive years returns on 30 May at Café del Mar Malta with a 2026 theme of Animals. It sits two days after the conference closes and is open to a broader audience than just conference delegates. For many in the iGaming community based in or around Malta, it functions as the social bookend to the week a gathering that is less about professional exchange and more about the community maintaining a sense of shared space.
The Charity Dimension
The Charity Gala by BGaming, held at Phoenicia Malta, supports DAR Bjorn a neurological care home in Malta. In its second year, the 2026 edition aims to surpass the €200,000 raised in 2025. The gala brings together industry figures and members of the local Maltese community. It is one of the few points in the week where the conference turns outward toward the host city rather than inward toward the industry.
What Malta Brings to the Week
Malta is not just a backdrop for this conference. It is, for much of the iGaming industry, a place of active professional and regulatory significance. The Malta Gaming Authority is one of the more established licensing jurisdictions in Europe, and many of the companies attending the summit have teams, licences, or corporate entities in the country. Attending a conference in the same city where regulators, lawyers, and compliance teams operate creates a kind of ambient utility that a conference held in a more neutral location does not.
That context shapes the tone of the week. Conversations at the summit tend to carry a specificity about regulation, market access, licensing that is harder to achieve when everyone is a visitor.
Overview
The main summit runs 27–28 May 2026 at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, Malta. The wider week of events spans 25–30 May, including sub-summits at Phoenicia Malta, satellite social events, morning fitness sessions, an industry golf day at Royal Malta Golf Club, and the closing pool party at Café del Mar on 30 May. Ticket tiers Full Event Pass and Premium Event Pass determine access to certain sub-summits and satellite events, with some sessions prioritised for Premium holders.
For anyone considering attending, the pre-registration event on Monday 26 May is worth building into the plan. The badge queue on a Wednesday morning, when five thousand delegates are trying to get through the same door, is a predictable and avoidable inconvenience.
Also Read: The Biggest Gaming Events Fans Need To Watch In 2026
