Down in the Caribbean, under the palm trees and hot April sun, about 2,000 individuals gathered last week for the Crypto Bahamas event co-hosted by crypto exchange FTX and investor forum SALT.
Goodie bags containing everything from sunscreen and sunglasses to T-shirts and boat hats were handed out as the air conditioning blasted at full force. Attendees flew in from as far away as Singapore and popped over from FTX’s headquarters, which is about a 20-minute drive from the conference.
Someone joked that it’s between the millionaires in suits and billionaires in cargo shorts. Anthony Scaramucci
“We wanted to create a premier conference geared toward institutions and people who will help shape policy and markets and distinguish it from the more retail-focused conferences,” Brett Harrison, president of FTX.US, told TechCrunch.
The three days of speakers began with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and SALT Chairman Anthony Scaramucci (who is also the founder and co-managing partner of SkyBridge Capital) taking the main stage to discuss where crypto stands in its journey.
“There’s a lot of different things going on — my generation needs a further, deeper dive into crypto,” Scaramucci, 58, told TechCrunch. “My generation needs to get comfortable with where this space is going.”
Some attendees were dressed in suits, while many others wore hoodies or T-shirts and casual shorts or jeans, juxtaposing the professional financial world against the new — and arguably more progressive — digital age.
On the first day, Scaramucci was wearing a dark navy suit with a light blue collared shirt and black dress shoes. “I’m dressed a certain way, [Bankman-Fried] is dressed a certain way, and someone joked that it’s between the millionaires in suits and billionaires in cargo shorts.”
By the last day of the event, Scaramucci wore green cargo shorts and a white T-shirt with FTX’s logo to match Bankman-Fried.
“We’re trying to create a bridge between traditional finance and DeFi,” Scaramucci said. Last year, FTX sponsored SALT’s NYC event in September, and afterward, the two companies decided they wanted to form a broader, deeper relationship, he added. This is the first crypto-specific conference SALT has done, Scaramucci said. “It’s an opportunity to showcase the country, showcase what FTX is doing and to again, create a bridge.”
Between the private island parties, networking events and Bahamian barbecues, a number of panelists took to the stage to dive into major topics surrounding the crypto ecosystem, including gaming and web3, digital assets fitting modern portfolios, the evolution of NFTs and building a new financial system, to name a few.
Some of the biggest names in the crypto industry spoke, including Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou, Matrixport co-founder Jihan Wu and Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan.
But panels also featured non-crypto natives, including former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, NFL quarterback Tom Brady and the Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslem.
“I think about having Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at the conference — these are seasoned world leaders who have seen a variety of societal, technological changes that occurred during their administrations and afterward,” Harrison said. “Getting their perspective on what this looks like from their vantage point, seeing the technology thrive and opportunities for financial innovation and inclusion, is really valuable and shows that people like them want to add their perspective to what’s going on.”
Major traditional firms like Visa, Fidelity Digital Assets, Sequoia Capital and Cambridge Associates also had employees in attendance.
“This shows that institutional adoption is really starting to take off with crypto,” Harrison said. “I think we are right on the edge of a major wave of institutional liquidity into crypto.”
There was a hacker house running throughout the event hosted by Solana, a Layer-1 blockchain; Pyth, a decentralized oracle solution; and Serum, a decentralized exchange. Developers and engineers sat side by side, coding away on their computers after attending educational programming on decentralized finance, NFTs and more about the Solana ecosystem.
Hacker houses focus on one of the main challenges behind crypto-focused products: getting people to use them, Yakovenko told TechCrunch.
“There have to be products so good that people are willing to install Phantom and all of that,” Yakovenko said. “So we have to find developers to ship these communities of products and build them to start the grind to get to product-market fit, and hackathons and hacker houses are part of that.”
Hacker houses are held both virtually and in cities where conferences take place, Yakovenko said. “It’s a free-for-all — some form teams, some meet here, some have already built a product and come here to meet other devs or find customers. So it’s really this weird part of community building.”
The conference also underscores FTX’s rapid growth as one of the largest crypto exchanges globally after it almost doubled its valuation from $18 billion in July 2021 to $32 billion in January 2022. As it stands, FTX is the third-largest crypto exchange in the world behind Binance and Coinbase. In the past 24 hours, about $1.8 billion in trading volume transpired on FTX, according to data on CoinMarketCap.
“This is happening. This is a wonderful delayering mechanism for the economy, and as it grows and as it scales, it’s going to be infinitely more,” Scaramucci said. “When you logged on [a computer] in the 1990s, you didn’t know what was going to happen really … but look at where we are now. That, to me, is where the blockchain world is going.”
While it may not be clear which protocols or blockchains will ultimately succeed in the long term, “we do know it’s happening, and I and others from the traditional world want to be a part of it,” Scaramucci said.