The Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong this year drew a strong crowd from mainland China, according to organisers, but it is a different, smaller mix of people than the Bitcoin Conference is used to seeing in the US.
The conference, held 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 Inc, which runs the Bitcoin Conference and owns Bitcoin Magazine. Without having data at hand, Bailey estimated that about half of the attendees were from mainland China, 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 for the event. 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 crypto trading is banned. Several attendees also suggested that they see Hong Kong’s push to become a crypto hub as tacit support from Beijing.
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“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.”
