Why are major crypto summits no longer as popular as they once were?

Written by: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager at Blockchain Capital

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

More and more people in the crypto industry are growing tired of big in-person offline conferences. I know a number of investors and founders—over the past couple of years, they were constantly running between major events, but now they’re starting to avoid the very cities they would never have skipped two years ago. The most common complaints are that attendance ROI is dropping and there’s less genuinely useful information, but those aren’t the root causes. What, exactly, is happening at offline industry conferences?

In the past, offline conferences mattered a great deal

Most industries develop locally first, then go global—for example, the software industry rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, while finance concentrates in New York and London. But from the very beginning, the crypto industry has been on a global track. Founders in Lagos and investors in Singapore wouldn’t originally be likely to meet. Yet the efficiency of partnering and discussing face-to-face is far higher than online video calls—offline interaction has always been a necessity.

The crypto industry doesn’t have fixed core cities. As a compromise solution, the various major conferences have become the go-to way for global practitioners to meet in person.

A pessimistic view: the conference value has been fragmented

The first time I attended a crypto conference, I noticed this problem. I had a main conference pass. At first, I kept turning down invitations to all kinds of smaller side events, assuming the core value of a paid ticket lay in the main venue. Later, a friend persuaded me to attend a private gathering at an ordinary coffee shop, and then I kept joining more and more similar small events.

By the third day of the conference, I finally understood the truth: high-quality developers and investors had all moved to these various smaller private gatherings. And the people who still clung to the main venue were effectively engaging in reverse selection—they didn’t receive invitations to private events with higher informational value. The content shared on the main stage was also lacking novelty: more than a dozen speakers onstage had already published all their viewpoints on social media platform X a few months earlier.

The entire industry gradually realized this. As a result, big flagship conferences have become merely an excuse for everyone to converge on the same city. Throughout the week of events, every hour there are a dozen-plus smaller side private gatherings, and attendees have to keep taking taxis to shuttle between venues.

One popular format that emerged from this is curated dinners with fewer than 20 people. But these small private dinners lack the “unexpected encounters” value that big conferences uniquely provide. Many of the key relationships I’ve built in the industry came from strangers who previously had no overlap. Several companies in our investment portfolio also originated from random encounters with private dinner information at conference events. While the purity of these information channels is high, the audience reach is far less than that of major conferences, making it hard to connect with new people outside the established circle.

The match that makes many people fully lose interest in big conferences is often just a single private dinner. Looking around the dining table, most of the people are practitioners from the same city, and the few unfamiliar faces will also meet again next month. After traveling thousands of miles overseas, you end up only talking to people you already know—or people you can quickly see in person. One reason this happens is that crypto talent has increasingly concentrated in a few cities like New York.

Another model has risen quickly: invite-only high-end exclusive conferences. It precisely filters attendees so that everyone present has exchange value, while also maintaining a certain scale to preserve the possibility of random encounters. But these closed-door events also have downsides: they create barriers between circles and contradict the early crypto ideal of equality—talking by merit with no gatekeeping. Newcomers and emerging practitioners find it hard to break into the core circles. Still, the information quality of these events remains stable, and the expected size is likely to keep expanding.

With small private gatherings constantly siphoning off participants, and high-end closed-door conferences continually emerging, traditional large conferences gradually lose their appeal under the double impact. Large conferences rely on network effects to survive: everyone travels to Singapore simply because everyone is going to Singapore. This positive feedback loop can reverse at any time. High-value investors and developers feel that the cost-performance ratio of attending has collapsed, so they choose not to show up; as the attendance value declines, it further discourages other attendees, creating a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to the crypto industry. After the AI track became widespread, similar trends appeared in in-person events in San Francisco as well: all high-quality exchange moved to private closed-door gatherings. This follows a very basic social logic: once everyone agrees that a certain event has high informational value, the core people migrate to smaller private gatherings.

A optimistic view: the industry’s center of gravity expands outward

On the surface, big crypto conferences are increasingly quiet. Are big crypto-coin events really going to disappear? There are fewer crypto-exclusive conferences because spending an hour explaining to financial institutions how stablecoins can be deployed yields far more than circle-jerking-style sharing inside the industry. Many practitioners who give up on attending put that time into serving traditional customers they’ve never interacted with—customers holding no crypto assets.

All top crypto companies are shifting toward external expansion. The adoption speed of stablecoins far exceeds industry expectations from a few years ago. Digital banks built on crypto infrastructure are pushing mainstream users outside the circle. Hyperliquid launched crude oil futures, and Polymarket introduced election and macro-hedging type products.

Now traditional finance conferences have added dedicated forums on stablecoins and roundtables focused on prediction markets. In the future, “crypto-exclusive conferences” may disappear gradually in the same way “internet-exclusive conferences” did in the early years. Once every industry conference includes crypto topics, a standalone crypto conference loses its meaning.

Where will major crypto conferences go in the future?

My guess is that the number of top-tier large crypto conferences held throughout the year will shrink significantly, and they won’t be held as an industry gathering every two months. During the phase when the industry is tightly knit inward and high-frequency conferences still have meaning, that era has already passed. The industry doesn’t need to hold a conference every two months to repeatedly prove itself. The real business growth increment is hidden across various tracks in the real economy.

This pattern already has precedent. After the industry expands and a large influx of participants arrives, effective information gets drowned out by massive noise, and high-quality exchange naturally contracts into private closed-door circles. If you want to achieve mainstream expansion of the industry, this cost is unavoidable—good or bad, it’s a sign that the industry is maturing.