Token2049 Chronicles Rising in the East, Falling in the West, Industry Gossip and Business Insights of Conference Organizing

Token2049 Chronicles East Rising, West Falling, Conference Organizing Gossip and Business Insights

Author: Xiaoming is a post-00s

Token2049 in Singapore has ended, and this may be the most informative essay.

How much money did the organizers make? What interesting gossip came out of this Singapore event? How do the big shots in the crypto world view next year’s market?

Let’s go!

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Upsurge and Decline

“People, people, people…”

Token2049 was packed with people, whether it was the main venue or various side events, it was packed with people, making one can’t help but think, “Is it really a bear market now?”

There were not only Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Southeast Asians, but also a large number of major project teams, VC, and KOL from Europe and America. Compared to the events in Hong Kong, Singapore can truly be called “internationalized”.

We randomly chatted with some overseas friends, and the summary is: US regulatory authorities are suppressing cryptocurrencies, policy risks have increased dramatically, and the Asia-Pacific market has become a new haven of freedom, where they come to seek funding and users.

In an interesting incident, a friend’s crypto VC is named “10Cents Ventures”, unexpectedly a bunch of overseas startup founders came up to pitch to him, hoping for investment, because they understood “10Cents Ventures” as “Tencent Ventures”.

A few months ago, saying “upsurge and decline” in the industry would inevitably invite ridicule, but the scene presented by Token2049 has made Singapore the global capital of cryptocurrencies.

Although the most top-notch VC and projects are still in the US, more and more projects are considering going abroad to expand into the Asia-Pacific market.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of Token2049, the simultaneously held Permissionless II in the US was somewhat awkward. Friends who attended the event in the US said that the number of attendees at Permissionless was much lower than before, and some sponsors were very dissatisfied.

An unconfirmed rumor from a well-known project team is that future conferences such as Consensus are also considering coming to Asia. In 2018, CoinDesk attempted to hold the Consensus conference in Singapore.

Devcon 2024 will choose between Thailand and Vietnam, and it can be foreseen that the future’s most core blockchain conferences will be concentrated in Asia.

How much money did the organizers make?

When attending the event, while marveling at the large number of people, I was also curious, “How much money did the organizers make?”

Over 10,000 participants registered for the main event, with over 400 sponsors…

While visiting various booths, I tried to inquire about their sponsorship prices, which varied. Depending on the size and location of the booth, prices ranged from $10,000, $30,000, $50,000, $70,000, and even higher. As for some core naming rights and large banners, the numbers are astronomical.

After the event, different answers were heard from different channels. Some said the organizer made 30 million US dollars this time, while others said they made around 15 million US dollars. 15 million US dollars is a more accurate answer, enough to make people envious.

In the first Token2049 in 2018, there were only about 1,000 attendees. After 5 years, it has grown 10 times, even surpassing the popularity of the Consensus conference in the United States and the Wanxiang Blockchain Global Summit in China last year and this year.

Behind this, there are indeed the personal efforts of the organizers, but perhaps more importantly, it is the course of history. The real turning point is 2022, when Singapore became the center of Web3 in the Asia-Pacific region.

In 2023, the United States’ regulatory stick came down again, causing many Web3 projects to consider leaving the United States. This conference had more than 15% of registered attendees from the United States.

The fate of Token2049 Singapore is closely related to the country of Singapore, becoming a beneficiary of crypto regulation and geopolitics between China and the United States.

The success of Token2049 Singapore is like the rise of many exchanges, waiting for competitors to make mistakes, seizing opportunities, and winning without effort.

Next year, in addition to Singapore, Token2049 will also be held in Dubai. Originally, Token2049 had another venue in the UK, but Token2049 London was too bleak in 2022, so it was canceled this year.

Dubai is another Web3 center, and Chinese people used to have visa-free access. To make money from holding the conference, it still relies on the Chinese.

Awkward guests

What is the significance of participating in blockchain conferences in various countries throughout the year?

Some do it for financing, some do it for market/BD, some do it for traveling and posting on social media, some do it to meet old friends… but probably not many people actually do it to listen to speeches.

This leads to an awkward scene at all blockchain conferences: a large group of people chatting and socializing outside the main venue, while a few people inside “listen to the speeches while playing with their phones.” Those outside, when tired of chatting, go inside to sit and rest, and the speeches of the guests on stage become just background noise.

Before the opening of Token2049, I attended an event where the guests on stage were exceptionally high-quality, all founders of top projects in the industry. However, the audience below was bustling, with only one-third of the seats filled. Moreover, most people were just sitting, with the majority chatting and socializing outside.

In that moment, my social awkwardness kicked in, so I quickly sat in the front row and stared at the guests, pretending to listen attentively, even though I couldn’t fully understand it. I just didn’t want them to feel too awkward, and tried to give them emotional value as much as possible.

Here, I would like to give special praise to the media organization Blockbeats, which sent more than 10 journalists and editors to attend Token2049, recording the speeches of the guests on-site, translating them into Chinese, and publishing them for dissemination in the first place.

Although we know that all events will eventually become social events, we still hold the idea of “doing an event with content” and co-hosted the Web3 Growth event “GM Singapore” with QuestN and imToken. We specially invited Mr. Liang Xinjun, co-founder of Fosun Group, and Amanda, the former CMO of Consensys and the first marketing director of Ethereum, to share their insights.

Originally, we only planned to hold a small event with about 100 people, but more than 1000 people registered in the background. Due to venue limitations, we could only approve less than half of the applications. As a result, we had to impose temporary access restrictions during the event, prohibiting people from entering.

During the event, we still couldn’t avoid a large number of participants engaging in social chat. It was unnecessary to forcefully prohibit it, but a considerable number of audience members listened to the full 4 hours, 10 speeches, and 2 roundtable discussions. We express our respect to them, Respect!

Industry Gossip

Where there are people, there is a community. Where there is a community, there is gossip.

For an industry that mostly operates remotely, offline conferences naturally become the best opportunity to exchange industry gossip.

Compared to Shanghai or Hong Kong, where gossip is limited to the Chinese community, the gossip in Singapore is more international. From sky-high fines to secret romances and scandals of overseas VC employees…

Gossip within the Chinese community is relatively traditional, mainly about who went in before, how much money they spent to get out; how much money was lost in the second-tier fund; severe internal conflicts; two partners of a certain VC leaving together…

Friends based in Singapore express that staying in Singapore can be a bit boring, and local gossip is also scarce.

Although Singapore is home to many cryptocurrency industry leaders, deep down in their hearts, they may all have a “dream of returning home,” hoping that one day they can return to Beijing, the place where their dreams began, and find recognition.

Compared to last year, the heat in Singapore has cooled down to some extent, and one obvious indicator is that rent in Singapore has dropped.

One reason may be that Singapore cracked down on major money laundering cases involving the “Fujian Gang,” causing many people to leave Singapore. There have even been cases of local Singaporean drivers discovering that their bosses and colleagues have disappeared overnight.

Bear Market Creating Assets

“Creating assets in a bear market and selling them in a bull market” has almost become an industry consensus.

What kind of assets are people creating during a bear market?

From my limited personal experience attending conferences, the most common types of projects I have seen are payment projects that facilitate fiat currency deposits and withdrawals, stablecoins, RWA, Gamefi, ZK…especially RWA. These have become the darlings of startups. In addition, there are some new stablecoins about to be launched, both from entrepreneurial teams and from leading crypto financial platforms.

One project that drew a lot of attention at the conference was The Open Network (TON). Leveraging the popularity of Telegram Bot, many believe that leveraging Telegram’s massive user base is a direction that can drive mass adoption.

The second observation is that many teams that have already issued crypto assets are now operating and building new projects. These same teams are starting fresh, rewriting narratives, seeking new financing, and issuing new tokens. Many teams have chosen to focus on ZK-related infrastructure.

Old narrative projects often run into dead ends or bottlenecks and are unable to break through. It has become a common phenomenon to change the narrative and seek new paths.

In the Chinese crypto community, “coin factories” seem to be not a derogatory term. People are more willing to invest in serial entrepreneurs who have experience in asset issuance. If they have succeeded once, they are more likely to succeed a second or third time.

When will the bull market come?

Token2049 was lively, but beneath the noise, there is still “anxiety” and “unease”: When will the bull market come? What will be the mainstream narrative of the next bull market?

In the current deep bear market in the primary and secondary markets, many early-stage projects are struggling. Some major exchanges are considering raising funds at high valuations, and some established projects are considering selling off completely…

On September 12th, I hosted a roundtable forum at the “2023 Asia Digital Asset Institutional Investor Summit” organized by Antalpha. Participants included Cobo co-founder Shenyu, ANTPOOL CEO, and Bitmain’s Market Director. When discussing the “2024 halving market” related issues, all the guests expressed a cautious and optimistic attitude, believing that this will be the last halving event that will have a significant impact on Bitcoin. Everyone has high hopes for next year’s market. In the crypto market, which relies heavily on “consensus and expectations,” confidence is often more important than gold.

Shenyu boldly predicts that the price of Bitcoin at this time next year will be between $40,000 and $60,000. All predictions can be proven wrong, but we still hope that Shenyu’s prediction will come true.

(PS: It is admirable to be fearless of being proven wrong in the crypto industry. Giving a direct judgment is much better than always being ambiguous or saying both positive and negative things, becoming a “perpetual-profit blogger.”)

In the current landscape filled with ZK and infrastructure, we look forward to truly killer applications. New people and new money will bring about a new bull market. Friend.tech and Telegram Bot are trends worth paying attention to. Going from 0 to 1 in Web3 growth is extremely difficult. I personally believe that parasitic and financialized Web2 social relationship chains and user accumulation are promising directions and trends.

Looking forward to a different surprise at Token2049 next year.

The above are just my subjective ramblings after drinking half a glass of Singapore Sling. Thank you for reading.

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