Editor’s note: Updated on April 19 to clarify that ETH Dubai was not affiliated with the Bitcoin-branded Lamborghini or Harry Yeh’s yacht party and report that DL News was ETH Dubai’s media partner.
For an industry that operates exclusively online, crypto has a lot of IRL gatherings. And for the crypto cognoscenti, these gatherings have become something of a travelling carnival.
The grandest of these events, such as the much-hyped ETH Denver in February, attract a global throng of thousands, while smaller conferences, like ETH Dubai last month, offer a more intimate setting for everyone to come together during the bear market and remind each other they’re in it for the tech.
But the nomadic nature of the conference circus can be quite wearying. “None of us feel like going to Dubai so shortly after Denver,” my friend JC from Fuel Labs told me when I said I’d be going to ETH Dubai. After all, these conferences are annual. If you miss it this year, they’ll be back on the table next year.
Unlike all other crypto events though, ETH Dubai presented possibly the rawest depiction of the elements that make up crypto.
Inside, strictly tech-centric discussions prevailed, while outside, lavish displays of wealth were on show, including a Bitcoin Lambo parked outside the conference amidst the unapologetic glitz. (ETH Dubai’s organisers stressed that they had nothing to do with the supercar.)
In it for the tech
The conference’s primary focus on tech was spearheaded by none other than Andre Cronje, the anti-hype hypeman of crypto. Famous for creating the yield optimisation protocol Yearn in the summer of 2020, Cronje has recently turned his attention to Fantom, a blockchain like – an alternative to — Ethereum.
“Don’t expect any hype,” one poster advertising Cronje’s conference talk warned.
Cronje often likes to be a buzzkill. He began his talk arguing against the common belief in crypto that scalability — how many transactions a blockchain processes in a given time — can be measured against traditional finance players.
“We’ve always focused on how many transactions Visa and Mastercard do,” he said. “But that’s not what we’re competing against — we’re not just a payments network.”
NOW READ: Andre Cronje: The rise and fall of a DeFi God
Crypto isn’t just trying to build decentralised finance, Cronje said. It offers an alternative to the centralised web, he explained, and that significantly increases the benchmarks the industry has to measure itself against. It’s a high bar — at that point, you’re looking at the number of all web transactions, like the http request made to DL News servers to read this article.
Cronje said limiting the industry’s scope to financial competitors has bred complacency. “People haven’t pushed as hard as they can,” he lamented.
But hype is an unavoidable aspect of the crypto industry, often lingering just beneath the surface of even the most dry technical discussions. Other conference talks covered a range of topics seen as the “next big thing” in crypto, from account abstraction and liquid staking to the usual topic of improving the user experience.
Besides hype, of course, another driving force of crypto is FUD — simply another word for negative news or rumour. There’s plenty of it in crypto, to be sure. Fittingly, one panel — where I spoke since DL News was ETH Dubai’s media partner — dealt with the FUD du jour like USDC depeg, bank withdrawal limits, and the Euler exploit that happened the day before, on March 13.
But perhaps “conference” is a bit misleading to describe the totality of experiences surrounding these events. The bulk of crypto conference activity revolves around picking up merch from numerous stalls, hobnobbing near them or skipping conferences altogether to prioritise side events.
And for the uninitiated, the business card equivalent at the crypto conference protocol is this: after you talk to someone for a while and it’s time to say bye, you both take out your phones, you have your Telegram barcode scanned, and then they take a selfie so that you both remember who the other person is (if you ever remember faces, that is).
Party on the Fantom whale’s yacht
“Congratulations on your upcoming speaking engagement at ETH Dubai,” said an email from an organisation called Enjoy Lif3. Odd name, I thought, is that a scam?
“We would like to invite you to our private Enjoy Lif3 networking party in Dubai Harbour on Thursday, March 16th. We will be hosting you on Ocean Sapphire, our 43m yacht.”
A yacht party in Dubai sounded like a perfect set-up for a potential IRL honey pot. But the invite said limited spaces and urged immediate sign-ups, and crypto had taught me to ape first, ask questions later. And as I figured out a bit later, Lif3 is the name of some DeFi protocol on Fantom, not an event organisation company, which only added further to my confusion.
The yacht party, it turns out, was actually legit and organised by none other than Harry Yeh, an early Bitcoin investor who later took a mammoth gamble on Fantom and is rumoured to have amassed a colossal fortune in billions as the cryptocurrency went ballistic in the last bull run. Investors in Fantom projects will recognise him as the man behind Fantom DeFi protocol Tomb Finance who never minces his words in his Discord interactions. (Once again, ETH Dubai emphasised it was not affiliated with the yacht party.)
Fantom whale Yeh’s Lif3 party was, as one fellow reveller described it, “classic Dubai”: burlesque dancers took the centre stage against a backdrop of a TikTok-esque “habibi, come to Dubai” remix.
Wanna buy my bankruptcy claims?
Before Yeh’s yacht began sailing and the party started, the lower deck of the yacht resounded with the fervent voice of a man engrossed in a conversation about bankruptcy claims.
Mark Lamb, co-founder of the beleaguered crypto exchange CoinFLEX, was busy promoting his latest venture, OPNX, a platform that offers customers the ability to trade bankruptcy claims for various crypto companies that had collapsed in the previous year, including the now-defunct FTX exchange. Sitting next to him was a jaded-looking Sudhu Arumugam, the other co-founder of Coinflex and OPNX.
As Lamb explained with an air of confidence, his direct audience of one dude-bro seemed to listen intently, his expression a mix of confusion and fascination. “Oh, wow, hmm” he often said. It wasn’t long before Lamb, with a knowing smile on his lips, reminded the rest of us in the audience of his firsthand experience with bankruptcy claims.
NOW READ: Short seller Jim Chanos says Coinbase ‘will still lose money’ even as crypto prices soar
CoinFLEX was embroiled in restructuring proceedings in a Seychelles court just last August, with the aim of raising $84 million to settle its own debts.
That experience pushed Arumugam and Lamb to team up with Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, co-founders of the bankrupt hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, to launch OPNX.
According to a leaked pitch deck from January, the quartet intended to raise $25 million to fund the establishment of the company, but the attempt was unsuccessful. OPNX launched two weeks ago and recorded a total trading volume of $13.64 in its first 24 hours – perhaps that dude-bro from the yacht provided all that liquidity.
In it for the money
Instead of the tech talk that dominated the conference, the main topic on the yacht was money. “Bro, if you want to write about a token, you need to look into [some obscure token name],” one fellow reveller told me, completely unprompted. “It’s massively undervalued right now.”
“I’ve invested apartments’ worth of money in it bro,” he said. “Apartments – plural!”
Every industry has its ups and downs, but crypto’s cyclical nature is often too stark.
“During the bull market, I’d receive 10-15 business requests per week,” a Solidity developer told me. “Right now, during bear, it’s maybe 1-2 per month.”
‘Bitcoin to $100,000!’
In crypto, however, there’s always buoyant and unbridled optimism — or hopium. After every bear cycle, a brighter dawn of a new bull market awaits. Yeh’s party lacked none of it.
As the two-hour sailing drew to a close, the music faded and a fervent voice boomed over the microphone: “Bitcoin to $100,000!”. That was about a week before crypto evangelist Balaji Srinivasin declared the $1 million target.
It’s remarkable to think that a mere six months ago, crypto was suffering a dark night of the soul. “We’re so back,” is now the sentiment, as Bitcoin hits above $30,000. Only $970,000 to go until Balaji’s target.
