I’m currently in Dubai and was lucky enough to attend Binance Blockchain Week 2024!

This was my first crypto event and I was excited to see what kind of interesting things I could learn and people I could meet.

The event was big and I’m guessing the attendance list went well into the thousands.

Despite the name, “blockchain week” is actually only a two-day event, so I’ll break down how things went down over those two days and what I thought.

Firstly, it’s very unstructured – there is a main floor area where people have their booths and you can go and chat with them and ask questions about their projects/products.

Then you have the main stage where most of the panels and major speakers are.

Then there is the smaller “Innovation stage” where people present on more niche topics that are basically more nerdy and technical stuff.

I tried to split my time between the three, but it’s tiring downloading all this knowledge into your brain that I also spent a lot of time sitting around and recharging.

Day 1 I tried to get to the main stage early and see the opening speeches, I missed a few but I caught the Dubai minister’s speech (I forget who, exactly), but he gave a good overview of the history of Dubai and explained their ambition to become the world’s crypto hub.

It’s exciting to hear and I think they will definitely blaze way ahead of countries like New Zealand and benefit immensely from it.

Multiple government ministers gave talks and joined panels, and they are unabashedly bullish on the industry.

Over the two days I listened to several interesting talks, some things I took away were:

• People seem more bullish on Solana than Ethereum
• Regulation is the big topic in the industry right now
• Stablecoins are becoming an important part of the market
• Almost no talk about NFTs
• Defi still active and necessary
• Memecoins are part of the culture and here to stay

As for the conference floor, I tried to visit the booths that struck an interest in me, but what I found is most of them are not aimed at people like me.

As an investor, I’m not specifically building anything on-chain, and so these teams coming to share their platforms and technology was meaningless to me. Even if they explain it to me, I won’t understand 90% of it.

However, one place where I did learn a lot was the Vultisig booth, where I spent quite a long time talking to the team there and learning about their wallet.

Vultisig is unique in that it doesn’t require a seed phrase or a hardware device, but still can store your cyrpto securely through a multi-signature system (using multiple devices, such as your phone and your laptop, plus multi-sig controlled virtual backups).

We set up a few wallets on my phone and they walked me through all the different security scenarios, like what if you lose your phone etc.

Need to fiddle with it more before I commit to using it, but the idea is cool!

There are also some games where you can have a bit of fun and meet other people while hanging out.

This is things like arcade games, foosball and bunch of other stuff.

The HODL Off was the most popular one, where you see how long you can hang on a pull-up bar:

I actually had a massive unfair advantage here since I hang almost every day, as this was one of the exercises I needed to do to rehab my shoulder injury.

So while everyone was trying it for the first time, I had a few years of practice.

Unsurprisingly I topped the leaderboard on both days, and won a cool Binance football shirt on Day 1, and then another one on Day 2!

Good times.

As for the Innovation stage, I listened to 3 or 4 talks here, and this was really valuable for one thing: It showed me how much I don’t know and how smart the people in this industry are.

Since it’s a more technical stage, the guys would be saying something like “You know when you build on Ethereum, and you rely on ZK, and if the TPS is less than 10,000, then your proof time is going to be x, I mean this is why Ethereum is so shitty right now, don’t you agree?” and everyone in the audience is nodding like yeah!

Obviously, I felt like the dumbest guy in the room because I understood none of it! (clearly, because that sentence above makes no sense, I’m sure).

This has confirmed that I should stay away from investing in any of these other cryptos that keep popping up and stick to the thing I do understand, which is Bitcoin.

A couple of other interesting things from the event:

People are bullish on Solana. So many people are building things on Solana, and all the chatter seemed to be about Solana. Barely anyone was talking about Ethereum – and that might be because it’s already so established and so many key projects are built there and it’s here to stay, but in the end, people just seemed much more excited about Solana. I met a couple of guys who had both founded their own projects and after Day 1 closed we met outside and ending up going for dinner. I asked them both “If you could pick any coin to put a million on and it has to go 20x” one of them said he would leverage up 4x on Solana and he was confident Solana would go 5x from there. The other guy agreed. That wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but it just solidified that people are indeed hyper-bullish on SOL.

Another lightbulb moment I had was during a talk panel and they were talking about predictions for 2025. One guy said, “2025 is very bullish because of quantitative easing, obviously M2 is going to continue increasing a lot, which obviously is bullish for us”. I started laughing but everything around me kind of hmmm’ed and nodded and I suddenly realised – these guys live in a different reality!

Let me explain – quantitative easing basically means “money printing” and M2 is the economic term for the money supply. So he was saying they government is going to continue printing shitloads of money in 2025, and the money supply is going to keep going up. Normally that’s considered bad, because it leads to inflation and devalues the currency, which nobody likes! Nobody likes it when prices go up in the supermarket, right? Except for these people. They don’t care what happens to the dollar, because they don’t own dollars! Their whole life is in crypto. They are working for crypto projects, they get paid in crypto, they have their savings in crypto. I’ve written before about how owning Bitcoin makes you immune to inflation, but I’ve still never “wanted” inflation. I still think inflation is bad, but I invest in Bitcoin because I know they will keep printing money. However, these people think inflation is great! Because every time the government prints, their Bitcoin becomes worth more and they get richer. And they’re all in on Bitcoin and crypto.

I’ve always known people like this exist and it’s possible to completely opt-out of the system, but seeing a community of them in real life was different. It changed it from something theoretical in my mind to something really real – I found it quite amazing.

So, what did I think?

I thought it was an awesome experience and even though a lot of it was over my head, I still think it was valuable and added to my knowledge.

Would I go again?

Probably not for a few years, if ever, but I’m really glad I went to this one. I didn’t learn anything outrageously new or surprising, but it’s definitely reinforced my Bitcoin thesis strongly. I believe it’s here to stay and it’s best days are definitely ahead of us!