Spring 2025 · Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai
I want you to picture the scene, because I do not think I could invent it. Fifteen thousand people, seventy per cent of them chief-something-or-others, gathered on the Dubai coastline to discuss the future of global finance — and the official programme offered them ziplines, a climbing wall, cold plunges, protein shakes and, I promise I am reading this correctly, intravenous drips. Somewhere between the vitamin infusion and the panel on sovereign debt lies the entire personality of this industry, and I mean that with a great deal of affection.
Welcome to TOKEN2049 Dubai, the crypto calendar’s most cheerfully overstimulated week, and — beneath the theatrics — a rather better guide to where money is going than its zipline might suggest. Let me walk you through it, and I’ll explain the jargon as we go, because none of this should require a decoder ring.
The festival that ate the city
The scale is faintly ridiculous. Fifteen thousand attendees drawn from over four thousand companies and more than a hundred and sixty countries, packed into the Madinat Jumeirah for two days — and then, spilling out into the city, over five hundred side events running in parallel, which is to say roughly one every few minutes, somewhere, for a week.
The speakers were the sort who move markets by clearing their throats. Changpeng Zhao, who founded Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, and who these days is the founder rather than its chief executive, having stepped down after pleading guilty to failures in America’s anti-money-laundering rules. Jeremy Allaire of Circle, whose company issues one of the two dollar-pegged tokens the entire market runs on. Arthur Hayes, an ex-exchange founder turned macro commentator with a gift for saying the thing everyone else is thinking and would rather not put their name to. Raoul Pal, once of Goldman Sachs, now of Real Vision, on the flows of global money. Pavel Durov of Telegram. A great many people from BlackRock, Bloomberg, JPMorgan and CME Group, all wearing the expressions of grown-ups who have arrived at a party rather earlier than they intended.
What they were actually talking about
Strip out the acronyms, and the agenda was surprisingly legible. A large chunk of it concerned institutional flows — a grand phrase meaning “where is the serious money going, and how does it get there?” The answer, increasingly, is through Bitcoin ETFs, which are simply funds you can buy through an ordinary brokerage account that hold Bitcoin on your behalf. That structure matters enormously, because a pension fund cannot faff about with a hardware wallet, but it can certainly buy a fund. What was once a retail plaything has become a pipe through which advisory and pension money now flows.
Then tokenisation, which sounds forbidding and means something rather dull: taking a real financial thing — a bond, a share, a slice of a fund — and representing it as a digital token that can move instantly, around the clock, without three days and a fax machine. Speaker after speaker described this not as a speculative punt but as the infrastructure of the next decade of finance. There were sessions on stablecoins, those dollar-pegged tokens now doing serious work in global payments. And there was a good deal of excitable talk about DePIN — decentralised physical infrastructure networks, an ungainly name for a genuinely charming idea: paying ordinary people in tokens to contribute real-world kit, a spare hard drive, a rooftop sensor, a slice of internet, and knitting it all into a network nobody owns. Whether it works at scale remains gloriously unproven.
The strength of weak ties
Here is the idea I’d like you to take away, and it explains why the 500 side events matter more than the main stage. In 1973, the sociologist Mark Granovetter published a paper, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties‘, in which he demonstrated something wonderfully counterintuitive: the opportunities that change your life rarely arrive through your close friends. They arrive through acquaintances — the people you half know. Your close circle, after all, knows everything you already know. It is the loose, peripheral connections that bridge into a world you have no access to that carry genuinely new information.
Which is precisely what a week like this manufactures, at industrial scale. Nobody flies to Dubai for the keynote; the keynote will be on YouTube by Thursday. They fly for the four hundred conversations happening in bars, on rooftops, in the queue for a cold plunge — the weak ties, forming by the thousand. It is why the industry keeps doing this, why so much of the real business gets done sideways, and, frankly, why the long lunch remains a power move in any field you care to name. The zipline is not frivolous. The zipline is the product.
Dubai’s bargain
None of which is accidental, of course. Dubai has spent years courting exactly this crowd, with a purpose-built crypto regulator, an admirably clear rulebook, and, let us not be coy, no income tax. It is routinely described as the friendliest major jurisdiction in the world for crypto businesses, and the firms have voted enthusiastically with their feet.
Whether that is admirable or merely shrewd depends rather on where you stand, and both cases deserve airing. Supporters see a government that decided to regulate an industry properly, instead of pretending it might go away, offering clarity where others offered silence. Sceptics observe that light-touch regimes reliably attract firms who find heavier touches inconvenient, and that “business-friendly” and “consumer-protective” are not always the same sentence. I hold no verdict for you. I’d only note that jurisdictions now compete for this industry the way cities once competed for factories — and that competition, in the long run, shapes the rules everybody ends up living under.
How I read it
I came away entertained and quietly instructed, which is more than one can say for most conferences. The froth is real: the ziplines, the IV drips, the man explaining his token to you at eleven at night with the fervour of the recently converted. But underneath, something sober was happening. Pension money is arriving through boring, regulated funds. Bonds are being tokenised. The people who once dismissed all of this now book flights to attend.
For anyone new to this world — and I hope some of you are — the lesson isn’t to buy something. It’s that the noisiest part of any industry is rarely the important part, and the important part is usually plumbing, described badly, by someone who has forgotten that not everyone speaks in acronyms. Learn the vocabulary. Watch what the patient’s money does. Make your own decisions slowly, with sums you can afford to be wrong about. And should you ever find yourself in Dubai with a lanyard round your neck, do skip the main stage for one afternoon. The good conversations are outside.
This is me thinking out loud in your company — a read on the room, not financial advice. What you make of an industry with a climbing wall is entirely your call.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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