Why are major crypto summits losing their former glory?

Original Author: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager at Blockchain Capital

Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

An increasing number of people are growing weary of large-scale crypto industry offline conferences. I know many investors and founders who, in previous years, would spend half their year traveling between major conferences, are now starting to avoid the cities they would have never missed two years ago. The declining return on investment for attending and the reduction of valuable information are the most common complaints, but these are not the root causes. What exactly is happening with industry offline conferences?

Once, Offline Conferences Held Great Significance

Most industries develop domestically before going global. For example, the software industry is rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, while the financial sector is concentrated in New York and London. However, the crypto industry was born as a global track from its inception. An entrepreneur in Lagos and an investor in Singapore would have been unlikely to meet otherwise. Yet, the efficiency of face-to-face collaboration far exceeds that of online video calls, making offline interaction a persistent necessity.

Without a fixed hub city, various large-scale conferences have become the compromise for global industry practitioners to connect offline.

A Pessimistic View: The Value of Conferences is Being Fragmented

I noticed this issue the very first time I attended a crypto conference. I had a pass for the main venue and initially kept declining invitations to various peripheral side events, naively believing the core value of my paid pass lay in the main event. A friend later persuaded me to attend a private gathering at an ordinary café, and I ended up joining several more similar small-scale events.

It wasn't until the third day of the conference that I saw the truth: high-quality developers and investors had all migrated to various small, private side gatherings. Those who remained faithfully in the main venue were effectively subject to adverse selection — they hadn't received invitations to the more valuable private events. The content shared on the main stage was also stale. Dozens of speakers had already published all their viewpoints on social platform X months prior.

The entire industry slowly came to realize this. Consequently, large main conferences merely became the pretext for everyone to travel to the same city. Throughout the week, dozens of small, private side events would be happening every hour, forcing attendees to take cabs shuffling between venues.

A popular format derived from this is the curated dinner with fewer than 20 people. However, these small private dinners lack the value of 'serendipitous encounters' unique to large conferences. Many of my key industry connections came from complete strangers I would have never crossed paths with otherwise; several companies in our portfolio also originated from random meetings on the conference floor. While the information quality at private dinners is high, their network coverage is far narrower than large conferences, making it difficult to meet new people outside one's immediate circle.

For many, the final straw that made them dismiss large conferences was often a private dinner. Looking around the table, most attendees were from the same city, and the few unfamiliar faces would usually be seen again within the month. Traveling thousands of miles overseas only to end up conversing with acquaintances or people you could meet locally soon. This phenomenon is partly because crypto talent is increasingly concentrating in a few cities like New York.

Another model is rapidly rising: high-end, invitation-only exclusive summits. These meticulously curate attendees, ensuring everyone present is worth engaging with, while maintaining a certain scale to preserve the possibility of random encounters. However, these closed-door events also have drawbacks: they create barriers and contradict crypto's early ethos of meritocracy and permissionless equality. It's difficult for newcomers and fresh-faced professionals to break into the core circle. Nevertheless, these events offer stable information quality and their scale is expected to continue growing.

Under the dual impact of continued fragmentation by small private events and the rise of high-end closed-door summits, traditional large conferences are gradually losing their appeal. Large conferences survive on network effects: people flock to Singapore simply because everyone else is going to Singapore. This positive feedback loop can easily reverse. High-value investors and developers, finding the cost-benefit ratio plummeting, choose not to attend; the value of the conference floor subsequently declines, further discouraging other attendees, creating a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon is not unique to the crypto industry. After the popularization of the AI track in San Francisco, a similar trend emerged in offline events: all high-quality exchanges shifted to private, closed-door gatherings. This is a fundamental social logic: once a consensus forms that an event is highly valuable, the core audience will migrate to smaller private rooms.

An Optimistic View: The Industry's Focus is Shifting Outward

On the surface, large crypto conferences are declining. Are large-scale crypto events truly dying? Fewer crypto-specific conferences exist because spending an hour explaining stablecoin real-world applications to a financial institution yields far greater returns than preaching to the choir. Many industry professionals who skip conferences are instead dedicating their time to traditional clients who have never touched crypto assets.

Top crypto enterprises are all pivoting toward outward expansion. The adoption of stablecoins is far outpacing industry expectations from a few years ago. Digital banks built on crypto infrastructure target mainstream users outside the industry. Hyperliquid launched crude oil futures, and Polymarket introduced products for elections and macro hedging.

Now, traditional finance conferences are adding dedicated stablecoin sub-forums and thematic roundtables for prediction markets. In the future, 'crypto-specific conferences' might gradually disappear, just like 'internet-specific conferences' did in the early days. When every industry conference includes crypto topics, the standalone crypto conference loses its purpose.

Where Are Large Crypto Conferences Heading?

I speculate that the number of top-tier large-scale crypto conferences throughout the year will shrink significantly; the era of holding an industry-wide conference every two months is over. During the industry's phase of insular development and consolidation, high-frequency conferences served a purpose. But the industry has long since moved past that stage. It no longer needs to hold a major event every two months to prove itself repeatedly. Real business growth lies within various sectors of the real economy.

This developmental pattern has historical precedents. As an industry expands and participants flood in, valuable information gets drowned out by noise, causing high-quality exchanges to naturally retreat into private, closed-door gatherings. This is a necessary price to pay for achieving mainstream expansion; for better or worse, it is a sign that the industry is maturing.