GM,

Singapore's side-event calendar is down nearly 40% from last year. We reviewed 4,000 companies attending TOKEN2049 to understand where the spend and attention are moving.

In this issue:

  • TOKEN2049 week & the state of conferencing

  • The top spenders

  • More TradFi, with a caveat

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Traveling for crypto conferences was once the only way to do business

Compared based on the same number of days before the conference

Today crypto is morphing into TradFi (and its conferences), regulation has reduced the need to leave home markets, and non-crypto conferences have become increasingly more relevant. Attention is spreading across more rooms:

  • TOKEN2049 week is down almost 40%: 510 side events vs. 814 in 2025

  • SF Tech Week by a16z is three times bigger: 1,459 side events, particularly relevant for crypto companies focused on AI and agentic payments, and taking place around the same dates.

  • Sibos became more relevant: SWIFT’s annual banking conference ran right before TOKEN2049 in Miami.

  • Enterprise teams have other rooms: Treasury and payments teams are less interested in crypto-native conferences, saving their budgets for Money20/20 in Las Vegas, Oct 18–21.

  • And some don’t need to travel: Teams in New York can now have many of the same meetings without getting on a plane.

The Top Spenders

The biggest spenders at TOKEN2049 are hosting their own events on top of sponsoring and speaking:

Others include Morpho (Vault Summit, $175M raised Jun 2026), NEAR (Quantum Privacy Day) and 0G Labs (0G Dev Day), all speaking and hosting their own events.

Four of the eight raised in H1 2026, and Kraken added another $100M last month. Across the broader dataset, 22 companies at TOKEN2049 raised $2.2B combined in H1.

Kraken, Anchorage, Canton, Monad, Morpho and 0G also showed up in Seoul during KBW, part of the 96 companies we tracked at both.

More TradFi with a caveat

  • TradFi continues to increase its presence at crypto conferences, with a caveat: TradFi mostly wants to meet other TradFi, where the liquidity is

  • The most desired players get to spend the least: Pay to Play does not apply to TradFi, and family offices don’t sponsor exhibitions

  • With the exception of PayPal, Grayscale and CME Group, most recognizable TradFi names are showing up as speakers, institutional partners and in small private events rather than sponsorships:

  • BlackRock

  • Goldman Sachs

  • Morgan Stanley

  • J.P. Morgan

  • Citi

  • Nasdaq

  • Franklin Templeton

  • Fidelity

  • HSBC

  • Standard Chartered

  • Deutsche Bank

  • Hamilton Lane

  • Clearstream

  • 150+ regional players

The person everyone's hunting for is 8% of the room

Nobody wants to meet with a BD, but everyone is BD

  • From our dataset, 60% of attendees are in sales roles: CEOs, founders, BD, growth, partnerships & ecosystem

  • The person everyone's hunting for is 8% of the room: Founders, C-level execs or technical and engineering leads that can say yes to an integration

We vibecoded a directory of companies attending TOKEN2049 week

Events we’re supporting at TOKEN2049

About Us

  • Mira is the discovery platform for digital finance and frontier tech - events, companies, jobs, and the people building it

  • We also run a private community for founders and builders

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