Crypto has arrived.
Two days in a row, on the train back to my AirBnB after panels at the WEF annual meeting, I met people who are involved in the crypto industry. Attendees who ventured outside of the Congress Centre, where the main panels were held, came face to face with posters and advertisements from different crypto companies. Panelists in various sessions brought up crypto unprompted. I went to a dinner hosted by an entity that has nothing to do with crypto and met someone who invested in certain cryptocurrencies years ago (and he was the second crypto investor I met at dinners!).
Clearly this industry is on people’s minds in some way, shape or form. The question is whether the crypto presence was worth it.
Industry participants paid massively for the privilege of splashing their banners across various buildings. No one shared any specific figures but it’s Davos. In a normal year, companies are competing with financial giants and lauded tech firms. This year, Accenture, SalesForce, Meta (formerly Facebook) and surveillance firm Palantir all set up facilities.
The rescheduling of Davos to May seems to have really thrown things off. Numerous people told me that this year’s event was much smaller than normal. It certainly ended very abruptly, with the security gates blocking off the Congress Centre taken down very quickly by early afternoon Thursday, despite the fact that in theory the event was still underway.
In other words, it’s possible, even plausible, that the crypto industry was able to take advantage of a gap in normal sponsorships to get a foot in the door, so to speak. It’s far too early to know whether they'll be able to repeat this during a normal WEF meeting (the next one will be Jan. 15-20, 2023). Matthew Blake, head of the future of financial and monetary systems at the WEF, told me that the annual meeting wouldn’t have any crypto panels if there wasn’t interest from multiple parties.
“Everything that we do from a thematic and research basis has a multi-stakeholder property to it,” Blake said. “That's kind of core to how we operate. And the answer is absolutely, I mean, I think one of the key areas where we've seen keen interest from central banks around the world is in the [central bank digital currency] space … We're doing interviews around the world with members of parliament, you know, central banking authorities, ministers of finance, and so on. I think there's a combination of like trying to understand the evolution of this space and staying on top of it.”
Even central bankers and finance regulators – though not necessarily welcoming crypto with open arms – are at least tolerating the sector.
The International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, told a panel discussing central bank digital currencies “not to pull out of” the cryptocurrency sector, adding that it is important to “separate apples from oranges and bananas.”
Others were more explicitly pro-regulation
Here are some thoughts on how the CoinDesk team approached this year’s event, and what we can or should do next year.
First off, I overestimated our access to reliable internet. A few of you pinged on Telegram but those messages usually came in hours later and didn’t load when the notifications came in. So that was definitely a bit of an unwelcome surprise.
I definitely started planning a bit late, considering how much happened during the week.
Still, given all the uncertainties and setbacks, I’m really proud of the team we sent. On the reporting side, we had myself, Sandali Handagama and Helene Braun, both of whom I think excelled (more of their coverage is coming in the next week).
I also didn’t realize just how nonstop the whole thing would be. While I expected it to be a bit chaotic, this felt far more like Consensus 2018 than Consensus 2019 (the real mid-Gs here know what I’m talking about). Still, to be clear, I think this was both a fun and productive time.
Speaking of which…
