London Crypto Week shows sector going mainstream

mid a stunning rally in the bitcoin price to $60,000 and mass blockchain adoption, I decided to check out last week’s London Crypto Week to find out where the industry is headed.

The two standout events were the two-day, multistage conference Token2049 at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden, and the Circle panel discussion at the top floor of the iconic Gherkin skyscraper in the middle of the City of London. I heard good things about the

Abra after-party, but declined. There is only so much crypto even I can take in one week.

Token2049 had some of the top industry names such as digital asset merchant bank Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz discussing the blockchain revolution to finance, while Blair

Halliday of the Winklevoss twins’ digital asset exchange, Gemini, and Sendi Young of Ripple discussed crypto regulation. There were also representatives of crypto big beasts Coinbase, Consensys and Tezos on the first day

The second day had everyone from Swissborg to Elliptic covering cutting-edge topics such as tokenomics, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and monetising the blockchain gaming revolution. It was a total information overload even for those very familiar with the industry.

The Circle event offered free drinks and breathtaking nighttime views across the city, with a robust panel discussing “DeFi’s (decentralised finance’s) Institutional Moment”.

The crypto week was capped off with the announcement that former chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, had joined crypto start-up Copper as a senior adviser on the company’s global expansion strategy.

The industry is clearly going mainstream and advancing at a dizzying pace. A few things have struck me about crypto’s evolution over the past five years.

Besides taking up a job offer with an asset manager in the city, one of the reasons I moved back to London in 2017 after a year away was that I was hearing so much in the fintech scene about crypto and its underlying distributed ledger technology, blockchain. I was determined to be at the heart of this astonishing financial evolution.

I have spent my free time over the past few years attending as many crypto and blockchain events as possible.

Before this blockchain revolution, I had of course heard of bitcoin at the beginning of the previous decade, used then mainly for illicit or supercool activities in the murkier and edgier corners of the internet.

But at about the middle of the previous decade, about 2015, when blockchain started really infiltrating the City of London, the scene was a mixed bag of evangelists, techbros and weirdos oh, and many fancy lawyers hoping to make money advising start-ups on the regulatory pitfalls of initial coin offerings.

In fact, many of the very first hard-core crypto events I went to were at law firms. I would also go to blockchain developer seminars at Kings College, and once went all the way to Cambridge to hear a seminar about this thing called “ethereum”. I was hungry for knowledge and approached the scene like Tom Wolfe would, in one of his epic gonzo journalism pieces.

I took a lot of ridicule at the outset, but I didn’t care it was clear something huge was happening. And I still believe we are at the very beginning and may see bitcoin at $100,000 at year’s end.

The Circle event certainly asserted the gentrification and ostentation of the crypto movement the Gherkin is the Swiss Re building, and the attendees were from many of London’s most established fintechs and respectable traditional financial services firms (what the crypto industry calls “TradFi”). With the money to be made in crypto expertise, there are now a lot more suits about, and nowadays they outnumber the techbros.