Author: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager at Blockchain Capital
Translation: Chopper, Foresight News
There is a growing sense of weariness towards large offline crypto industry conferences. Many investors and founders I know used to spend half their year traveling between major summits, but now they are beginning to avoid cities they wouldn't have missed two years ago. Declining return on participation and a drop in valuable insights are the most common complaints, but these aren't the root causes. What exactly has happened to offline industry conferences?
Once, Offline Summits Were Pivotal
Most industries develop locally before going global—for instance, the software industry took root in the San Francisco Bay Area, and finance clusters in New York and London. However, the crypto industry has been a global race from its inception. Entrepreneurs from Lagos and investors from Singapore would normally be unlikely to meet. Yet, the efficiency of face-to-face collaboration far surpasses that of online video calls, making offline interaction a constant necessity.
The crypto industry lacks a fixed core city. Thus, various large-scale conferences have become the compromise solution for global practitioners to connect offline.
The Pessimistic View: The Value of Summits Has Been Disaggregated
I noticed this issue during my first crypto summit. I had a main conference pass and initially turned down invitations to various peripheral small-scale events, assuming the core value of the paid ticket was in the main hall. Later, a friend persuaded me to attend a private gathering at an ordinary café, after which I participated in several similar small-scale events.
It wasn't until the third day of the conference that I saw the truth clearly: high-quality developers and investors had all shifted to various peripheral small private gatherings. Those who stubbornly stayed in the main hall were, in fact, part of a reverse selection process—they hadn't received invitations to the more valuable private events. The content shared on the main stage was also unoriginal; over a dozen speakers had already posted all their viewpoints on social platform X months prior.
The entire industry gradually became aware of this. Consequently, the large main summits merely became the pretext for everyone to flock to the same city. Throughout the week, there were over a dozen peripheral small private events every hour, forcing attendees to rush between venues by taxi.
One popular format that emerged from this is the curated dinner with fewer than 20 attendees. However, these small private gatherings lack the unique "serendipitous encounter" value of large conferences. Many key connections I've built in the industry came from complete strangers; several companies in our portfolio originated from random encounters at conferences. While the information density at private dinners is high, the reach is far narrower than that of large summits, making it difficult to meet new people outside one's immediate circle.
For many, what finally led them to view large summits with indifference was often a private dinner. Looking around the table, most attendees were practitioners from the same city, and the few unfamiliar faces would be seen again the following month. Traveling thousands of miles overseas only to end up conversing with acquaintances or people you could easily meet offline soon after. This phenomenon partly stems from the gradual concentration of crypto talent in a few cities like New York.
Another model is rapidly gaining traction: high-end, exclusive, invitation-only summits. These events meticulously screen attendees, ensuring everyone present has valuable insights to share, while maintaining a certain scale to preserve the possibility of random encounters. However, these closed-door events also have drawbacks: they create barriers, contradicting crypto's early ethos of meritocracy and barrier-free equality. Newcomers and rising talents find it hard to break into the core circles. Nevertheless, with their consistent information quality, these events are expected to continue expanding in scale.
Under the dual impact of small private gatherings siphoning off value and high-end closed-door summits rising, traditional large-scale conferences are gradually losing their appeal. Large summits survive on network effects: people flock to Singapore simply because everyone else is going to Singapore. This positive feedback loop can reverse at any moment. High-value investors and developers, feeling the ROI of attendance has plummeted, choose not to attend; the quality of the conference subsequently declines, further discouraging other attendees and creating a vicious cycle.
This phenomenon is not unique to the crypto industry. After the proliferation of AI, similar trends appeared in offline events in San Francisco: high-quality exchanges all shifted to private, closed-door gatherings. It's basic social logic: once people deem an event highly valuable, the core crowd moves to smaller, private settings.
The Optimistic View: The Industry's Focus Is Expanding Outward
On the surface, major crypto summits appear to be declining. Are large cryptocurrency events truly dying out? The decrease in crypto-exclusive summits is because spending an hour explaining stablecoin applications to financial institutions yields far greater returns than circle-jerk sharing within the industry. Many practitioners who have stopped attending conferences now invest their time engaging with traditional clients who have never touched crypto assets.
Leading crypto companies are all pivoting toward external expansion. Stablecoin adoption has far exceeded industry expectations from a few years ago; digital banks built on crypto foundations target ordinary users outside the circle; Hyperliquid listing crude oil futures, Polymarket launching election and macro hedging products.
Now, traditional finance summits specifically add stablecoin forums and prediction market roundtables. In the future, "crypto-exclusive summits" might gradually disappear, much like early "internet-exclusive summits" did. When all industry conferences include crypto topics, separate crypto summits lose their significance.
Where Will Major Crypto Conferences Go From Here?
My guess is that the number of top-tier large crypto summits annually will significantly decrease, no longer holding industry-wide conferences every other month. During the industry's inward-looking, circle-building development phase, frequent summits had their place; but the industry has long since moved past that stage. The industry doesn't need to repeatedly prove itself with a major conference every two months. The real business growth lies in various sectors of the real economy.
This development pattern has precedent. After an industry expands and a flood of participants enters, valuable information gets drowned in massive noise, and high-quality exchanges naturally contract to private, closed-door settings. This is a necessary cost for achieving mainstream industry expansion; for better or worse, it is a sign of the industry maturing.
