加密大型峰会为何风光不再？

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 conferences. I know many investors and founders who used to spend half the year traveling between major events, but now they are beginning to avoid cities they wouldn't have missed two years ago. The declining return on investment and the diminishing amount of valuable information are the most common complaints, but these are not the root cause. What is really happening to industry conferences?

Once, In-Person Conferences Were Crucial

Most industries develop locally before going global. For example, the software industry is rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the financial sector clusters in New York and London. However, the crypto industry has been a global track from its inception. An entrepreneur in Lagos and an investor in Singapore would unlikely meet otherwise. Yet, the efficiency of face-to-face collaboration far surpasses that of online video calls, making in-person interaction a persistent need.

Without a fixed hub city, major conferences became the compromise for the global crypto community to connect offline.

Pessimistic View: The Value of Conferences Has Been Fragmented

I noticed this issue the first time I attended a crypto conference. I had a main venue pass and initially kept declining invitations to various side events, assuming the core value of my paid ticket lay in the main hall. But after a friend persuaded me to attend a small gathering at a regular café, I ended up joining several more similar small events.

By the third day of the conference, the truth was clear: high-quality developers and investors had all gravitated towards various small, private side gatherings. Those who remained anchored to the main venue were, in fact, subject to adverse selection—they hadn't received invitations to the more valuable private events. The content presented on the main stage was also stale. Dozens of speakers had already shared all their insights on social platform X months prior.

The entire industry has slowly come to realize this. Consequently, large main conferences have merely become the pretext for everyone to fly to the same city. Throughout the week, a dozen side events happen every hour, forcing attendees to jump in taxis between venues.

A popular format that emerged from this is curated dinners with fewer than 20 people. However, these small private dinners lack the value of "serendipitous encounters" unique to large conferences. Many key connections I've built in the industry came from strangers with whom I had no prior overlap; several companies in our portfolio originated from random meetings at the venue. While private dinners offer high-quality information, their reach is far narrower than large conferences, making it difficult to meet new people outside one's immediate circle.

The turning point for many to dismiss large conferences is often a private dinner. Looking around the table, most are industry peers from the same city, and the few unfamiliar faces are people they'll meet again next month. Traveling thousands of miles overseas, only to end up talking to acquaintances or people you'll see soon anyway. 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 events meticulously select attendees, ensuring everyone present is worth talking to, while maintaining a size that allows for serendipity. However, this closed-door format has its drawbacks: it creates barriers and contradicts the early crypto ethos of meritocracy and permissionless egalitarianism. It's difficult for newcomers and emerging talents to break into the core circle. That said, the information quality is consistently high, and this format is expected to keep expanding.

Under the dual impact of continued fragmentation from small private events and the rise of exclusive summits, traditional large conferences are losing their appeal. These large conferences rely on network effects: everyone goes to Singapore simply because everyone else is going to Singapore. This positive feedback loop can easily reverse. When high-value investors and developers perceive the cost-benefit ratio has plummeted, they choose to stay away. The perceived value of the event then declines, further discouraging other attendees, creating a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon is not unique to crypto. Following the popularization of AI, offline events in San Francisco have shown a similar trend: high-quality interactions have all migrated to private, closed-door gatherings. This is a basic social dynamic: once a core group perceives an event as valuable, they shift to smaller, more exclusive settings.

Optimistic View: The Industry's Focus is Shifting Outward

On the surface, large crypto conferences appear to be declining. Are major crypto events truly dying? Fewer crypto-specific conferences happen because spending an hour explaining stablecoin real-world applications to a traditional financial institution yields far greater returns than preaching to the choir. Many who have stopped attending conferences are dedicating their time to traditional clients who have never engaged with crypto assets.

Leading crypto firms are all pivoting to outward expansion. The adoption rate of stablecoins has far exceeded industry expectations from a few years ago. Digital banks built on crypto infrastructure primarily target users outside the core crypto community. Hyperliquid launched crude oil futures, and Polymarket introduced products for elections and macro hedging.

Now, traditional financial conferences are adding dedicated panels on stablecoins and roundtables on prediction markets. In the future, "crypto-specific conferences" might slowly fade away, much like "internet-specific conferences" did in the early days. When every industry conference includes a crypto track, standalone crypto conferences lose their purpose.

Where Are Large Crypto Conferences Heading in the Future?

I suspect the number of top-tier global crypto conferences will drastically decrease. There will no longer be a major industry gathering every two months. Frequent conferences were meaningful during the industry's phase of internal community building and development, but the industry has long since moved past that stage. The industry doesn't need a major conference every two months to repeatedly validate itself. Real business growth lies across various sectors of the real economy.

This pattern of development has historical precedent. As an industry expands and a flood of participants enters, valuable information gets drowned out by noise, and high-quality interactions naturally retreat to private, closed-door settings. This is the inevitable cost for achieving mainstream expansion; for better or worse, it marks the industry coming of age.