In partnership with
GM,
New York hosted more AI events earlier this month than crypto held all year, bringing back memories of crypto at peak optimism.
In this issue:
What we learned from NY Tech Week
Poll: Half of you are skipping Devcon Mumbai
How crypto is breaking into TradFi
13 conferences already competing for attention during TOKEN2049 week
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🗽NY Tech Week felt like crypto circa 2021
While crypto debates event ROI, Tech Week reached 1500 events, 50k people and 5x growth since A16Z launched it five years ago. Three things stood out:
1. Creators beating crypto
ElevenLabs built a pop-up where everything ran on voice - coffee, merch, music, even audiobooks narrated by iconic voices.
Their next stop was Cannes, but not for ETHCC, for Cannes Film Festival.
When asked about crypto: "Creators and enterprises first. Maybe agentic stuff later."
2. AI agents pre-matched founders and investors
3. Free compute is the new airdrop
Verci, a members club, gave every builder in town free workspace, food, and WiFi — all funded by sponsors competing for developer mindshare
HyperAgent by Airtable handed out $10k in credits across its events
AI companies are buying developer attention the same way crypto did in 2021.
🇮🇳 Half of you are skipping Devcon Mumbai
The Ethereum Foundation cut 54 positions and 40% of its budget in a single day, further fueling debate about the state of the ecosystem. In Vitalik’s words, “Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years.”
In the last issue, 48% of you voted not attending this year’s Devcon:
Our takeaway on the current EF discourse: If two parties fundamentally disagree on first principles, one more Twitter thread won't change anyone's mind. Best to pick the church that aligns with your beliefs and respectfully disengage from the other religions.
And, as with any good religion, at some point you fork it and pick a new Messiah.
🏦 How do you get in the room with Goldman Sachs?
Merch from Solana Breakpoint 🇦🇪
You attend their invite-only, no public website, Digital Assets Conference held at their London HQ on June 30. The only proof this annual event exists is LinkedIn posts from participants.
If you weren’t on their 800 people guest list,
here are 5 other ways crypto is breaking into TradFi:
💰 Buy (or acquihire) the room
RedStone acquired Security Token Market and TokenizeThis conference in NYC, giving them instant access to institutional circles it would otherwise have to build from scratch.
Fairmint acquired The RWA Desk, a media and events brand that hosted private gatherings for TradFi, so they could continue building out institutional distribution in-house.
👨✈️ Hire a seasoned TradFi executive. As DevRel roles decline, the new power move is hiring someone who already knows the allocators.
🤝 Pay someone to make the intros. There are agencies selling access to institutional networks. Whether that's VC money well spent is another question.
🏦 Drop crypto, target TradFi events. Some teams have shifted their event budgets almost entirely toward banking, payments, and institutional gatherings.
🗽 Move to New York. There's a quiet influx of crypto founders relocating to NYC just to be closer to TradFi.
TLDR; The fastest way into TradFi is to acquire, hire, acquihire or physically move closer to it.
🔄 100 days till TOKEN2049, and 13 conferences already announced
Singapore isn't hosting one crypto conference anymore. It's hosting an entire institutional circuit compressed into a single week. So far, 13 full-day summits, all with an institutional focus, have already been announced:
Fund Forum Asia
Hyperliquid Forum
Hype Singapore Conference
Digital Asset Yield Summit
The Best Event Summit
Founder x VC Summit
HSC Asset Management
Gamma Prime Investing Summit
Stablecoin Summit
Vault Summit
RWA Summit
Digital Asset Summit
In the next issue, we'll explore all the ways crypto is chasing new pools of capital.
What do you want us to write more about?
Member Updates
From our private community
Welcome new members: Ashton Keys, founder of Society Protocol and Aaron S, Director of Industry Engagement at the MiCA Crypto Alliance
Ivan, Founder of Cerebral Valley, is hiring an Event Manager
Mentasuave launched Humane - An underlying layer that aligns AI with human potential
Ivan from Inference Labs has been accepted into Ethereum Protocol Fellowship Cohort 7
Who Are We?
We’re building cryptonomads.org—the go-to place to discover crypto events, companies, jobs, and professionals.
We also run a private club—a community of crypto founders and builders
