The main venue is deserted, personal gatherings have diverted key connections, and the crypto conference has changed its character.

Written by: Jonah Burian, Investment Manager at Blockchain Capital

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

More and more people are getting tired of large offline summits in the crypto industry. I know several investors and founders who used to spend half the year traveling between major conferences, but now they are starting to avoid cities they wouldn’t have missed just two years ago. The decline in returns from attending conferences and the reduction of valuable information are the most complained-about issues, but they are not the root cause. What has really happened to offline summits in the industry?

Once, offline summits were crucial

Most industries develop locally before going global, such as the software industry rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area and the financial sector clustered in New York and London. However, the crypto industry has been global from the very beginning. Entrepreneurs in Lagos and investors in Singapore would not have originally interacted. Yet, face-to-face discussions are far more efficient than online video meetings, so offline interactions remain a necessity.

There is no fixed core city in the crypto industry; major summits have become a compromise for global practitioners to connect offline.

Pessimistic perspective: The value of the summit has been fragmented

I noticed this issue during my first crypto summit. I had a main venue pass and initially kept declining various invitations to smaller side events, assuming the core value of paying to attend was at the main venue. Later, a friend advised me to go to a private gathering held at a regular café, and after that, I attended several similar small events.

It wasn’t until the third day of the conference that I saw the truth: high-quality developers and investors had all moved to various small private gatherings. Those who stubbornly stayed at the main venue actually belonged to a reverse selection process—they hadn’t received invitations to more valuable private gatherings. The content shared at the main venue was also stale, as the dozen or so speakers had already published all their viewpoints on the social platform X months prior.

The entire industry gradually recognized this fact. Thus, large main summits have simply become an excuse for everyone to converge in the same city. During the week of activities, there are dozens of small private gatherings every hour, and participants can only take taxis to navigate between venues.

This has given rise to a popular form of selective dinners with less than 20 attendees. However, these small private dinners lack the unique value of "serendipitous encounters" that large summits provide. Many key connections I have built in the industry came from strangers who originally had no intersection; several companies in our investment portfolio also emerged from randomly meeting at private dinners. Even though the purity of information is high, the range of people covered is far less than that of large summits, making it difficult to meet newcomers from outside the圈层.

For many, the tipping point that made them completely lose interest in large summits often comes from one private dinner. Looking around the table, most participants are local practitioners, and a few unfamiliar faces will also be seen the following month. Traveling thousands of miles overseas ultimately ends up with familiar faces, or people who can easily meet again offline. This phenomenon is partially caused by talent in the crypto industry gradually concentrating in a few cities like New York.

Another model is rapidly rising: high-end exclusive summits with a full invitation system. Participants are precisely selected, ensuring everyone present has communication value while maintaining a certain scale to preserve the possibility of random encounters. However, this type of closed-door event also has its drawbacks: organizational barriers, which go against the equal ideals of the early crypto world based on merit and lacking thresholds. Newcomers and fresh practitioners find it difficult to penetrate the core circles. Nevertheless, these types of events have stable information quality and are expected to continue expanding in scale.

With the continuous diversion to small private gatherings and the rise of high-end closed summits, traditional large summits are gradually losing their appeal. Large summits rely on network effects for survival: everyone travels to Singapore simply because everyone goes to Singapore. This positive cycle can reverse at any time. High-value investors and developers feel that the cost-effectiveness of attending has plummeted and choose not to show up; as a result, the value of the main venue declines, further deterring the remaining participants and creating a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon is not unique to the crypto industry. After the AI sector gained popularity, various offline activities in San Francisco have also shown a similar trend: high-quality exchanges have all shifted to private closed gatherings. This is a fundamental social logic: once everyone recognizes that a certain event has high value, the core group will shift to smaller private gatherings.

Optimistic perspective: The industry focus is expanding outward

On the surface, large crypto summits are becoming increasingly desolate. Are large cryptocurrency events really destined to disappear? The decrease in exclusive crypto summits is because spending an hour explaining stablecoin applications to financial institutions yields much higher returns than in-group sharing. Many practitioners who decide not to attend are investing their time into traditional clients who have never encountered crypto assets before.

Leading companies in the crypto sector are all turning to outward expansion. The adoption rate of stablecoins is surpassing the industry’s expectations from a few years ago; digital banks constructed on crypto infrastructure are targeting ordinary users outside the圈层; Hyperliquid has launched crude oil futures, and Polymarket has introduced election and macro hedging products.

Now, traditional financial summits are adding separate forums on stablecoins and roundtables on predictive markets. In the future, "exclusive crypto summits" may disappear gradually like "exclusive internet summits" did in the past. When all industry conferences include crypto topics, standalone crypto summits will lose their significance.

Where will large crypto summits head in the future?

I speculate that the number of top-tier large crypto summits per year will significantly decrease, with no longer being held every two months. The industry is in a phase of internal cohesion; high-frequency summits have their existence significance, but the industry has long since crossed that period. The industry doesn’t need to hold a conference every two months to repeatedly prove itself; real business growth lies in various tracks of the real economy.

This pattern of development has precedents. After an industry expands and a large influx of participants occurs, effective information gets drowned in massive noise, causing high-quality exchanges to naturally contract to private closed gatherings. Achieving mainstream expansion for the industry comes at this inevitable cost; whether good or bad, this is a hallmark of the industry’s maturation process.