Author: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager, Blockchain Capital
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
More and more people are growing weary of large-scale offline crypto industry conferences. I know many investors and founders who used to spend half the year jetting between major summits but are now starting to avoid cities they would never have missed two years ago. The most common complaints are the declining return on participation and the scarcity of valuable information, but these are not the root causes. What exactly has happened to offline industry conferences?
Once, Offline Summits Were Pivotal
Most industries develop locally before going global—for example, the software industry took root in the San Francisco Bay Area, and finance clustered in New York and London. But the crypto industry has been a global race from its inception. An entrepreneur from Lagos and an investor from Singapore were unlikely to meet otherwise. However, face-to-face discussions are far more efficient than online video calls, making offline interaction a persistent necessity.
Without a fixed core city for the crypto industry, various large-scale summits became a compromise solution for global practitioners to connect offline.
The Pessimistic View: Summit Value Has Been Fragmented
I noticed this issue at my first crypto summit. I had a main venue pass and initially declined invitations to various small peripheral events, assuming the core value of the paid attendance lay in the main sessions. Later, a friend persuaded me to attend a private gathering at an ordinary cafe, after which I went to several similar small events.
By the third day of the conference, I saw the truth clearly: high-quality developers and investors had all shifted to various small peripheral private gatherings. Those still clinging to the main venue were actually negatively selected—they hadn't received invitations to the more valuable private events. The content shared on the main stage was also stale, with the dozen or so speakers having already published all their views on social media platform X months earlier.
The entire industry gradually realized this. Consequently, the large main summit merely became the excuse for everyone to flock to the same city. Throughout the week of events, there were a dozen peripheral small private gatherings every hour, forcing attendees to rush between venues by taxi.
One popular derivative form is the curated dinner with fewer than 20 participants. However, such small private dinners lack the unique "serendipitous encounter" value of large summits. Many of my key connections in the industry came from strangers with whom I had no prior交集; several companies in our investment portfolio also originated from random encounters at conferences. While the information purity of private dinners is high, their reach is far smaller than that of large summits, making it difficult to meet new people outside one's existing circle.
For many, the final straw that made them completely disillusioned with large summits was often a private dinner. Looking around the table, most attendees were practitioners from the same city, and the few unfamiliar faces would be met again next month. After traveling thousands of miles overseas, they ended up conversing with acquaintances or people they would soon see offline. This phenomenon is partly due to the gradual concentration of crypto talent in a few cities like New York.
Another model is rapidly rising: high-end, exclusive, invite-only summits. They meticulously screen attendees, ensuring everyone present has交流 value, while maintaining a certain scale to preserve the possibility of random encounters. However, these closed-door events also have drawbacks: they create圈层壁垒, contradicting crypto's early ethos of meritocracy and barrier-free equality. Newcomers and emerging practitioners find it hard to break into the core circles. Nonetheless, with their stable information quality, such events are expected to continue expanding in scale.
Under the dual impact of small private gatherings continuously siphoning off value and high-end closed-door summits constantly emerging, 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 virtuous cycle can reverse at any time. High-value investors and developers feel the cost-benefit ratio of attending has plummeted and choose not to attend; the quality of the attendees subsequently declines, further deterring other participants, creating a vicious cycle.
This phenomenon is not unique to the crypto industry. After the proliferation of the AI sector, similar trends appeared in various offline events in San Francisco: high-quality交流 all shifted to private closed-door gatherings. This is basic社交 logic: once people perceive an event as highly valuable, the core crowd moves to smaller, more private settings.
The Optimistic View: The Industry's Focus Is Expanding Outward
On the surface, large crypto summits seem to be declining. Are large-scale cryptocurrency events really dying out? The reduction in crypto-specific summits is because spending an hour explaining stablecoin applications to financial institutions yields far greater returns than圈内 self-congratulatory sharing. Many practitioners who have given up on attending conferences invest their time in reaching traditional clients who have never接触过 crypto assets.
Leading crypto companies are all转向对外拓展. Stablecoins are普及 faster than the industry anticipated years ago; digital banks built on crypto infrastructure target普通圈外 users; Hyperliquid launched crude oil期货, and Polymarket推出 election and macro hedging products.
Now, traditional finance summits专门增设 stablecoin forums and prediction market panel discussions. In the future, "crypto-specific summits" might gradually disappear, much like early "internet-specific summits" did. When all industry conferences include crypto topics, separate crypto summits lose their purpose.
Where Are Large-Scale Crypto Summits Headed?
My guess is that the number of top-tier large crypto summits per year will drastically decrease, no longer holding an industry conference every two months. During the industry's inward-looking, huddling phase, frequent summits had their place; the industry has long since moved past that period. The industry doesn't need to hold a conference every two months to repeatedly prove itself. The real business growth lies within various sectors of the实体 economy.
This development pattern has precedents. After an industry expands and participants flood in, valuable information gets drowned out by massive noise, and high-quality交流 naturally contracts to private closed-door gatherings. This is a necessary price to pay for achieving mainstream industry expansion; for better or worse, it's a sign of the industry maturing.
