Why Have Major Crypto Summits Lost Their Luster?
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Why Have Major Crypto Summits Lost Their Luster?
The main venue is deserted, private gatherings divert core connections, and crypto conferences have lost their original essence.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager at Blockchain Capital
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
More and more people are growing weary of large offline summits in the crypto industry. I know many investors and founders who spent half the year traveling between various summits in previous years, but are now starting to avoid cities they would never have missed two years ago. Declining ROI on attendance and less effective information are the most common complaints, but this is not the root cause. What exactly is happening with offline industry summits?
Once, Offline Summits Were Pivotal
Most industries develop locally first before going global, such as the software industry rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the financial industry concentrated in New York and London. But the crypto industry has been a global sector since its inception. Entrepreneurs in Lagos and investors in Singapore were unlikely to meet originally. However, the efficiency of face-to-face cooperation discussions is far higher than online video conferences, so offline communication remains an essential need.
The crypto industry has no fixed core city, so various large summits have become a compromise solution for global practitioners to connect offline.
Pessimistic Perspective: Summit Value Has Been Fragmented
I noticed this problem the first time I attended a crypto summit. I had a pass for the main venue and initially declined invitations to various peripheral small events, assuming in my mind that the core value of paid attendance lay in the main venue. Later, a friend persuaded me to go to a private gathering held in an ordinary coffee shop, after which I consecutively attended multiple similar small events.
It was not until the third day of the conference that I saw the truth: high-quality developers and investors had all moved to various peripheral small private gatherings. Those still sticking stubbornly to the main venue actually belonged to the reverse selection—they did not receive invitations to higher-value private gatherings. The content shared at the main venue was also nothing new; more than a dozen speakers on stage had already published all their views on the social platform X several months ago.
The entire industry is slowly realizing this. Thus, large main summits have merely become an excuse for everyone to rush to the same city. Throughout the week of events, there are more than a dozen peripheral small private gatherings every hour, and attendees can only take taxis to shuttle between various venues.
A popular form derived from this is curated dinners with fewer than 20 people. But such small private dinners lack the "serendipitous encounter" value unique to large summits. Many key connections I built in the industry came from strangers who originally had no intersection; several companies in our portfolio also originated from random encounters at venues. Although the information purity of private dinners is high, the coverage range is far less than that of large summits, making it difficult to reach new people outside the circle.
The trigger that makes many people completely lose interest in large summits is often a private dinner. Looking around the table, most attendees are practitioners from the same city, and the few strange faces will also meet next month. Traveling thousands of miles overseas, in the end, all communication targets are acquaintances, or people who can be met offline soon. One reason for this phenomenon is that crypto industry talent is gradually concentrating in a few cities such as New York.
Another model is rising rapidly: all-invitation high-end exclusive summits. Participants are precisely screened, everyone present has communication value, while maintaining a certain scale to retain the possibility of random encounters. But such closed-door events also have drawbacks: circle barriers, violating the early crypto egalitarian ideal of meritocracy and no barriers. Newcomers and emerging practitioners find it difficult to squeeze into the core circle. However, the information quality of such events is stable, and the scale is expected to continue expanding.
Small private gatherings continue to divert traffic, and high-end closed-door summits continue to rise; under this double impact, traditional large summits are gradually losing appeal. Large summits survive by network effects: everyone rushes to Singapore simply because everyone else will go to Singapore. This positive cycle can reverse at any time. High-value investors and developers feel the cost-performance ratio of attendance has plummeted and choose not to attend; the value of the venue decreases accordingly, further discouraging other attendees, forming a vicious cycle.
This phenomenon is not unique to the crypto industry. After the AI sector became popular, various offline events in San Francisco also showed the same trend: high-quality communication all moved to private closed-door gatherings. This is very basic social logic: once everyone deems an event has high value, the core crowd will move to smaller-scale private gatherings.
Optimistic Perspective: Industry Focus Expands Outward
On the surface, large crypto summits are becoming increasingly depressed. Are large cryptocurrency events really going to perish? The reason there are fewer crypto-exclusive summits is that spending an hour explaining stablecoin practical applications to financial institutions yields far higher returns than self-indulgent sharing within the circle. Many practitioners who gave up attending conferences have devoted their time to traditional clients who have never touched crypto assets.
Top crypto enterprises are all turning to outward expansion. The adoption rate of stablecoins far exceeds industry expectations from a few years ago; digital banks built on crypto infrastructure mainly target ordinary users outside the circle; Hyperliquid launched crypto oil futures, and Polymarket launched election and macro hedging products.
Nowadays, traditional finance summits specifically add stablecoin sub-forums and prediction market thematic roundtables. In the future, "crypto-exclusive summits" may slowly disappear like "internet-exclusive summits" in the early years. When all industry conferences include crypto topics, separate crypto summits lose their meaning.
Where Will Future Large Crypto Summits Head?
I guess the number of top large crypto summits throughout the year will be significantly reduced, no longer holding an industry conference every two months. In the stage where the industry clustered inward, high-frequency summits had a reason for existence; nowadays the industry has long passed that period. The industry does not need to hold a conference every two months to repeatedly prove itself; the real business growth lies hidden in various sectors of the real economy.
This development pattern has precedents. After industry expansion and a massive influx of participants, effective information is drowned out by massive noise, and high-quality communication naturally contracts to private closed-door gatherings. Wanting to achieve mainstream industry expansion, this is a necessary cost; whether good or bad, this is a sign of the industry moving towards maturity.
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