Bitcoin Asia show attracts mainland enthusiasts
Interest exploding amid price surge and supportive HK policies like ETFs
The Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong this year drew a strong crowd from the mainland, according to organisers, but it is a different, smaller mix of people compared with the Bitcoin Conference is used to seeing in the United States.
The conference on Thursday and Friday had about 5,500 attendees confirmed ahead of the show, not accounting for door registrations, said David Bailey, co-founder and CEO of BTC, which runs the Bitcoin Conference and owns Bitcoin Magazine.
Without having data at hand, Bailey estimated about half of the attendees were from the mainland, where interest in the conference was strong owing to Hong Kong’s recent launch of spot bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and an explosion in development of layer 2 projects.
Many bitcoin enthusiasts also flew in from other countries. Some in the community expressed hope that the city’s supportive policies for the cryptocurrency industry could eventually be an avenue to tapping investors on the mainland, where commercial cryptocurrency trading is banned. Several attendees suggested they saw Hong Kong’s push to become an industry hub as tacit support from Beijing.
“I think the ETFs were kind of an admission that bitcoin is here to stay,” Bailey said. “There’s no way that Hong Kong just accidentally stumbled into launching an ETF … It wasn’t random.”
Cryptocurrency investors also applauded Hong Kong’s new ETFs, as they accept in-kind subscriptions, which allows purchases made with bitcoin and ether. This feature is “very important”, according to Bailey, because investors can use the ETF shares as collaterals for loans. Managers of the two ETFs, Harvest Global and China Asset Management, have both said they are working on pushing ahead with the collateralisation of their products in the city.
The Hong Kong government, which invited the Bitcoin Conference to hold its Asia event in the city, has been very supportive, according to Bailey. The city has already hosted multiple Web3-related events this year, including the WOW Summit and the Web3 Festival, as it seeks to bring in more tourism and cryptocurrency industry players.
“I think they see bitcoin as a massive opportunity for Hong Kong,” Bailey said.
The first bitcoin-focused conference of its size in Asia in several years, Bitcoin Asia is much smaller than the US event, which was previously held in Miami, Florida, and will be hosted in Nashville, Tennessee, this year. That conference attracted about 30,000 people, Bailey said.
Alex McShane, director of programming for the Bitcoin Conference, said turnout in Hong Kong was still much higher than he expected.
Bailey said the company was already in discussions with Hong Kong for returning, with eyes on the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. The event was held at the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal this year.
Tokyo and Singapore are also options for future Asia events, according to McShane.
Some in the industry are hoping to regain a foothold on the mainland, which was once a major centre of bitcoin activity. That evaporated almost overnight in 2021 when authorities pushed out nearly all mining activity, although much of that has since returned, albeit quietly.
Ben Gagnon, chief mining officer at Canada-based Bitfarms who used to run mining operations in China, hoped Hong Kong could be a “conduit for Chinese investors” to access bitcoinrelated technologies – something he saw as possibly mitigating the impact of the property crash and the stock slump.
“What I’m optimistic about is, with these rules and these regulations now in place, Hong Kong actually may find a way to be this bridge for China to bitcoin and to the greater crypto ecosystem in a way that’s more safe, more controlled or regulated,” Gagnon said.
Besides the increasing financialisation of bitcoin, the asset has seen its price surge driving interest in layer 2 solutions. A layer 2 on a blockchain is a secondary network meant to help with scalability and efficiency, such as by offloading calculations to a less congested secondary chain.
Chinese developers were spread across the main floor of Bitcoin Asia touting new companies building their own layer 2 networks.
“There is an explosion of innovation happening in bitcoin right now,” Bailey said. “To go from let’s call it 200 million bitcoiners in the world to 2 billion people in the world, we need to dramatically improve bitcoin scalability.”
Still, while optimistic about the new opportunities, he noted some similarities with previous rounds of bitcoin hype.
“Some of these ideas are going to be famous companies a decade from now, some are gonna go to zero. So it’s still the wild, wild west but … it’s now the Wild West on layer 2 of bitcoin,” he said.