When I first started my company, everyone told me the exact same thing: "Conferences are the lifeblood of this industry. If you aren't there, you don't exist."
So, I listened. I spent 2 years circling the globe, living out of a suitcase to meet clients.
My takeaway? Crypto conferences are broken. 👇
1/ The "Mega-Festival" fatigue is incredibly real 👯
After flying across continents, you realize these giant events have turned into chaotic, loud noise. By trying to cater to retail investors, core devs, VCs, and regulatory lawyers all at once, they end up serving nobody well.
2/ Main stages have become sponsor theater 🎭
Because these massive events are so expensive to produce, main stage slots have largely become pay-to-play marketing pitches. Instead of honest debates about scaling bottlenecks or UX friction, you get 20-minute panels of VCs and portcos nodding along to buzzwords.
3/ The Side-Event Paradox ☕️
As a founder trying to get real work done, I quickly learned that the actual value happens outside the main venue at random coffee shops or dinners. If the perimeter events are consistently higher quality than the ticketed conference, the core model is failing.
4/ We have completely losing the plot 🧭
Compare to other deep tech sectors like AI. They have longstanding, rigorous academic conferences like NeurIPS where the foundational Transformer papers were first shared, and where some of my university friends have presented their own research. AI leads with peer-reviewed breakthroughs based on published research.
5/ Meanwhile, the absolute cesspool of online casino hype in “crypto” makes the world forget that blockchain is a legitimate technological innovation first.
We are pioneering groundbreaking research in advanced encryption, zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, and highly complex consensus and proof mechanism designs. This is all part of applied math. Where is that rigor on stage?
6/ Having been on the ground for 2 years meeting clients, here is how we fix this and bring back the builder-first laboratory:
🥼 Call for Academic Rigor: We need true academic-grade conferences. Blind peer reviews, strict research tracks, and actual mathematicians and computer scientists driving the agenda, not marketing leads.
♾️ Radical Sub-Specialization: Stop building generic "crypto" conferences. Give us hyper-focused summits: one purely for ZK-cryptography engineering, one strictly for stablecoin infrastructure, one for consumer UX.
Proof-of-Contribution Tickets: Stop gating by wallet size. Allocate major blocks of tickets to active open-source devs and builders based on merit, and invite academic researchers based on publications.
🎬Crypto was built on the ethos of permissionless innovation, cryptography, and rewriting global digital ownership infrastructure. Our gatherings should reflect that.
I value the clients I've met worldwide, but it's time to phase out the hype-circus and build the serious technical stages our industry deserves. 🧵🔚