Why are major crypto summits no longer as impressive?

Author: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager at Blockchain Capital
Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

More and more people in the crypto industry feel bored with major large-scale in-person conferences. I know plenty of investors and founders—where in previous years they would spend half a year running between major conferences, now they’re starting to avoid cities they would never have missed two years ago. People most often complain about falling event ROI and fewer actionable pieces of information, but that isn’t the real root cause. What exactly is happening at offline industry conferences?

Once, in-person conferences mattered a lot

Most industries grow locally first, then go global—for example, the software industry takes root in the San Francisco Bay Area, and finance clusters in New York and London. But from the very beginning, crypto has been a globalized race. Founders in Lagos and investors in Singapore initially wouldn’t be likely to meet. Yet the efficiency of in-person collaboration is far higher than online video calls, so offline networking has always been a must-have.

Crypto doesn’t have a fixed set of core cities. So these large conferences have become a compromise: a way for global participants to connect in person.

A pessimistic view: conference value gets fragmented

I noticed this problem the first time I attended a crypto conference. I had a badge for the main event. At first I kept turning down invitations to various smaller side events, assuming the core value of paying was in the main hall. Later, a friend convinced me to attend a private gathering hosted in a normal coffee shop—after that I went to several more events like it.

By the third day of the conference, I finally saw the truth: high-quality developers and investors had all moved to these various smaller private meetups. Anyone who still clung to the main venue was effectively performing a reverse selection—missing out on the higher-value private invitations. The main-stage talks were also lacking novelty. Dozens of speakers on stage had already published all their viewpoints on social media platform X months earlier.

The whole industry gradually became aware of this. As a result, large flagship conferences became merely an excuse for everyone to converge on the same city. Throughout the entire week of activities, there were a dozen or more private side gatherings every hour, forcing attendees to take taxis and shuttle between venues.

One popular format derived from this is curated dinners with fewer than 20 people. But these small private dinners lack the “chance encounters” value that large conferences uniquely offer. Many of the key relationships I’ve built in the industry came from strangers who originally had no intersection with me; several companies in my investment portfolio also came from these kinds of random run-ins at conferences. Even though the information purity at these private dinners is high, the audience coverage is far less than at large conferences, making it difficult to meet newcomers outside the core circle.

A private dinner is often the spark that makes many people fully lose interest in large conferences. When you look around the dinner table, most people are local practitioners, and the few unfamiliar faces will likely meet again next month. After traveling across ten thousand miles overseas, you end up networking with people you already know—or people you can meet in person very soon anyway. Part of this comes from the talent in the crypto industry increasingly concentrating in a few cities such as New York.

Another model has risen quickly: invitation-only high-end exclusive conferences. It precisely filters who gets invited; every attendee has meaningful value for conversation; and it still keeps a certain scale to preserve the possibility of random encounters. However, these closed-door events also have drawbacks: they reinforce “circle barriers,” which goes against crypto’s early equal-standards idea of “talking with实力 (merit) without gatekeeping.” Newcomers and emerging practitioners have a hard time breaking into the core circles. Still, the information quality of such events is stable, and their scale is expected to keep expanding.

With small private meetups constantly siphoning off attention and high-end closed-door summits continually emerging, traditional large conferences gradually lose appeal under the double impact. Large conferences survive on network effects: everyone goes to Singapore because everyone else will go to Singapore. That positive feedback loop can reverse at any time. High-value investors and developers feel the conference value-for-money has collapsed and choose not to attend. Then the quality of the event declines further, discouraging more would-be attendees—forming a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to crypto. After the AI sector became widespread, similar trends also appeared for in-person events in San Francisco: all high-quality networking shifted to private closed-door gatherings. This is a basic social dynamic—once everyone agrees a particular event has high value, the core group moves to smaller private meetups.

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

On the surface, major crypto conferences are getting increasingly quiet. Will major cryptocurrency events truly disappear? If there are fewer crypto-exclusive conferences, it’s because spending an hour explaining how stablecoins are implemented at financial institutions yields far more than the self-indulgent sharing within the bubble. Many people who decide not to attend conferences put that time into traditional clients they’ve never touched before in crypto assets.

Crypto’s leading companies are all turning toward external expansion. The adoption speed of stablecoins is far faster than the industry’s expectations from a few years ago. Digital banks built on crypto infrastructure target mainstream users outside the circle. Hyperliquid’s launch of crude oil futures and Polymarket’s election and macro-hedging products are also part of this trend.

Traditional finance conferences have started adding stablecoin forums and panel discussions on prediction markets. In the future, “crypto-exclusive conferences” may slowly fade away in the same way “internet-exclusive conferences” once did. When every industry conference includes crypto topics, standalone crypto summits lose their meaning.

Where will major crypto conferences go in the future?

My guess is that the number of top-tier major crypto conferences throughout the year will drop significantly, and there won’t be an industry conference every two months anymore. During the stage when the industry was bonding inward and frequently expanding, high-frequency conferences had their rationale. But the industry has long moved past that period. It doesn’t need to hold a conference every two months to repeatedly prove itself. The real business incremental growth is hidden in various tracks of the real economy.

This pattern already has precedent. After the industry expands and participants flood in, effective information gets overwhelmed by massive noise, so high-quality exchanges naturally shrink to private closed-door rooms. If you want mainstream expansion and growth, paying this cost is unavoidable—good or bad, it’s a sign that the industry is maturing.