The never-ending cycle of crypto conferences continues this week with the latest installment of Consensus getting underway in Miami. You can argue the industry would be better off if its biggest players spent more time building and shipping than palavering on stage, but, if nothing else, the conference scene is useful as a vibe check.
At one extreme, I can recall the 2018 edition of Consensus. That was the year promoters parked Lamborghinis on New York City’s 6th Avenue, making “Lambos” a permanent part of crypto culture. Inside the venue, fly-by-night law firms manned “ICO in a box” booths, while hucksters stalked the hallways with white papers in hopes of unloading shitcoins on industry newcomers. The scene was one of excess but also unbridled optimism.
Contrast that to the mood of depression and dread that pervaded the conference circuit in early 2023, following the Sam Bankman-Fried crackup and the exposure of rampant fraud across the industry. Some longtime crypto veterans correctly assessed the situation as a temporary setback, but the more common response was dark mutterings about who on stage the previous year would be arrested next, or how to pivot to AI.
Based on the handful of crypto events I’ve attended this year, the vibe feels somewhere in between. It is nowhere near as dark as early 2023 when Bitcoin got knocked all the way back to below $20,000, but neither is there the bevy of wild-eyed characters running around with “to the moon” predictions. Sure, the tribal OG guys are still around who like to fire up the faithful with pronouncements about Bitcoin going to $1 million. But the more common sentiment involves folks quietly telling each other that things no longer feel the same.
It’s true that gatherings these days don’t have the same energy as in earlier days, but you can also argue that energy has dispersed. Blockchain is no longer a frontier technology built by outlaws and visionaries, but has become instead mainstream software finding its way into every corner of Wall Street. In this environment, parts of crypto are starting to feel like a staid SaaS play rather than an exciting get-rich-overnight counterculture.
In this new era, it’s less viable for startups to mint billions of new tokens tied to a project they may or may not build, and then dump them on retail customers. As for those retail investors, many of them have finally gotten tired of being burned by crypto schemes, and are instead turning to places like prediction markets as their preferred forum for setting money on fire.
The upshot is that, these days, it’s increasingly grown-ups and serious people left in crypto. This is a good thing and a big reason that Fortune has decided to acknowledge the industry’s many accomplishments with the Crypto 100, a new and definitive list that will drop on June 11. Stay tuned for details about the official announcement, which will highlight ten winners in ten categories—and show how the crypto industry has finally grown up.
Jeff John Roberts [email protected] @jeffjohnroberts
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