Coin Bureau Conference 2022 Recap

There are some key monumental dates of epic historical significance in the crypto industry. These events will go down in history as pivotal moments for Bitcoin and all of Cryptocurrency, events that will be remembered and celebrated throughout the ages.

Let’s look back on some of the occasions that solidified cryptocurrencies and contributed to the industry that we all love and helped to make it what it is today:

October 31, 2008- Satoshi Nakamoto first released the Bitcoin whitepaper.

January 12, 2009- The first ever Bitcoin transaction, sent by Hal Finney for 100 BTC.

May 22, 2010- Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two Papa John’s Pizzas for 10,000 BTC, sparking the tradition of the annual Bitcoin Pizza Day.

December 18, 2014- The world was gifted with the first use of the word HODL.

July 30, 2015- Ethereum was born.

February 8, 2021- Elon Musk Announces Tesla would purchase $1.5 billion in BTC.

September 7, 2021- El Salvador becomes the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.

May 7, 2022- The Coin Bureau hosts the first-ever Coin Bureau Conference. The first of many may I add.

Okay fine… maybe some mentions on that list are more monumental than others but hey, it was a big day for us! We could not be prouder of the outcome, nor could we be more grateful and thankful to our incredible community, partners, and sponsors who supported us, attended the event, and made the whole thing possible.

If you were fortunate enough to be there in person, I hope that you enjoyed attending the event as much as we enjoyed hosting it, and enjoyed meeting the Coin Bureau team as much as we enjoyed meeting many of you.

If you were not able to make it there in person, we did broadcast the event virtually and posted the recordings to our Coin Bureau Clips channel.

Here is part one:

And here is part two:

If you were not able to attend the event, don’t fret. Mark your calendars and we hope to see you there next year. This article will cover exactly what went down, and why we chose to host the event in the first place.

Why Host a Coin Bureau Event?

I know every YouTube channel makes this claim, but we honestly believe that we have the best community in all of crypto. We have the largest crypto YouTube channel and the largest crypto community spanning across Telegram, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and our blogs and articles are enjoyed by thousands of readers each month.

The reason we chose to host an event was simply that we wanted to give something back to our incredibly supportive, kind, and generous community, as well as the many friends we have made in the crypto space.

We live in a strange era where much of our time is spent interacting with one another through computers and mobile devices. We wanted to host an event to get the chance to have real face-to-face interactions with many of you that we have gotten to know so well over the years and take some time to forget about the markets, forget about price, and just have a chat and a laugh, network, and make new friends.

Having a meet and greet with our community was something we had thought about doing for a while. When we decided to put it to our community for a vote on whether or not a Coin Bureau Conference would be something that our viewers would be interested in, we had about:

• 2 million+ subscribers on YouTube
• 675k+ followers on Twitter
• 195k+ followers on Telegram
• 150k+ followers on TikTok
• 140k+ followers on Instagram

We ended up putting the decision to a vote on Twitter to see how many people would be interested in an event, and with the majority saying yes, we knew we had a green light to go.

Once we received feedback that a Coin Bureau event was something our community would be interested in, we started pushing the information to our other socials groups, received more positive feedback, and it was pretty clear what needed to be done.

It isn’t just our community who supported this idea, you don’t become the biggest crypto YouTube channel in the world without making some friends in high places. We ran the idea past our friends at FTX, LunarCrush, Celsius, Swissborg, and MegaFans, who also thought it was a good idea, and the next thing you know, a plan was being formed.

Once we announced to our community that tickets were available for sale, we were delighted, albeit, slightly surprised to find out the event sold out in a matter of days. Guess we will need to find a bigger venue for the next one.

We wanted the event to be free, but were also aware that as soon as you offer a free event, a lot of tickets would be picked up by people who likely wouldn’t attend, so we put a price on for 5 GBP to ensure we were attracting folks who genuinely wanted to be there.

Upon entrance, attendees received a free drink voucher, barista-made speciality coffees, and a pretty nifty swag bag, so they definitely got their money's worth within minutes of entering the venue.

The Venue

Roll out the red carpet, polish the chandeliers, and dust off the tuxedo because we managed to secure one of the fanciest venues in London, the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms. I’ll bet that a place this swanky has never seen the likes of us crypto folk before.

I will admit that it felt a bit upscale for a load of crypto crusaders and DeFi degenerates like ourselves, but hey, just because my screensaver is a picture of Vitalik riding a unicorn on a rainbow, that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy the finer things in life, so we went with it.

Here is how the venue looked as advertised:

And this is what it looked like after we gave it the crypto makeover:

And just so you don’t need to worry about a dress code for the next event, I will say that I did not see a single attendee show up in a tuxedo, top hat, nor monocle, so I think it is safe to say we upped the “cool-factor” and brought down the stuffiness of the place. There were some legendary crypto t-shirts that I saw, I always love the quirkiness of the crypto community.

Partnership and Sponsors

When we reached out to our network and let them know that we were going to be hosting our first Coin Bureau event, I must say that we felt like the popular kid in high school leading up to the prom and had no shortage of “suitors.” The amount of support, advice and kind words of encouragement from our network of friends and partners gave us the reassurance we needed to know that this was going to be a great event.

In order to make the event possible, we partnered with LunarCrush who helped out immensely; we could not be more grateful to them for the support as we could not have done it without them. 🙏

LunarCrush is a social intelligence platform for cryptocurrencies. They collect activity across various social media platforms to help crypto traders and investors perform in-depth sentiment analysis and have seen a huge uptick in popularity and adoption since their launch. They were a fantastic partner and ally for the conference and were a pleasure to have on stage to discuss a multitude of topics.

For Sponsors, we had FTX, FTX.US, Celsius, MegaFans, Cudos, Juno, SwissBorg and Unique Network.

Some of our sponsors sent members from their teams to give talks, run events, and engage with the attendees from branded booths, makings some valuable contacts and connections while meeting some interesting members of our community.

Speakers

The event kicked off at noon with a welcome speech from Guy and Macey, then a quick chat from Guy about the importance of crypto, the failure of the traditional financial system, and why we need crypto now more than ever.

The event was broken into two parts, the morning session looked something like this:

Following Guy’s introduction, we had our first Fireside chat with LunarCrush’s Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Jon Farjo, along with the Chief Partnership Officer for SwissBorg, Alex Fazel. They had a great session on how LunarCrush helps with sentiment analysis, then a chat about the importance of the crypto community.

Following that, we had the Head of Brand for LunarCrush, Norman Rabinovich, give a talk about the significance of brand then he welcomed Ben Livshitz, CEO of Zilliqa on stage to discuss brand, Web3, blockchain, and the journey of Zilliqa.

After that, it was time for Guy to come back out on stage and welcome our friends and YouTube stars over at CryptoBusy and Coin Club Japan to have the first breakout session panel discussion about the evolution of Altcoins.

Following the Altcoin chat, we had Irina Karagyaur of the Unique Network. After securing a Polkadot Parachain Slot (congratulations!), Irina came to the event to give us an incredible talk about the Metaverse, the next generation of NFTs, and future developments in the NFT and Metaverse space.

That conversation was the perfect Segway for Luke Gniwecki of the Cudos Network to talk about how the Cudos network is building out their layer 1 blockchain which will support web3-enabled cloud computing and a decentralized community-governed and permissionless compute network.

After all that excitement, there was a P2E live gaming tournament hosted by MegaFans where there was $5,000 in BTC up for grabs, followed by some free time to mingle, network and discuss all things crypto.

The evening session then kicked off at 5 pm and had a schedule that looked like this:

Guy kicked off the start of the second session with a bit of much-needed hopium, briefly discussing all the developments happening in the space that isn’t reflected in price and went on to talk about how there is a shortage of developers before bringing on a member of the Coin Bureau Recruitment team.

Shortly after that, Guy brought on YouTuber and friend of the Coin Bureau, Rob, from Digital Asset News to discuss his journey into the crypto space, taxes, relocating, and the current state of crypto investing.

Directly after Rob, we were joined by Maren Altman to tell us all about content creation and the importance of having a social media strategy.

This brought us to the second Fireside chat of the day with Joe Vezzani, the CEO and Co-Founder of LunarCrush, and industry veteran and Managing Director at OGroup, Maja Vujinovic, discussing what brought her into crypto, the impact that blockchain technology can have in developing countries, and why it is important to be optimistic about the future and why we need to take chances.

Following the Fireside chat, we had a panel discussion with Guy, our head of research Dan Krupka, and DeFi Dad, to cover all things DeFi related, and wow, do they get into some fascinating topics. They discuss topics such as what makes a good DeFi project, the best way to optimally utilize DeFi in a bear market, and how to safely navigate the whacky world of DeFi.

The final chat of the evening was titled DAO or DIE, where Guy and Dan discuss all things DAO related with Max Schneider of Mango Markets, Luke Gniwecki of Cudos Ventures, and Elizabeth Yeung of Ignite Group. After the final discussion, there was another P2E tournament hosted by MegaFans and free time for some networking.

Overall Thoughts on the Coin Bureau Conference

The conference turned out to be quite a success and the CB team along with their partners and sponsors earned a well-deserved pat on the back for pulling it off and creating such a memorable event. The tone was overall very positive, and it was nice to see everyone come together to chat, meet new people, build business connections, network, and make friends.

The event was full of entrepreneurs who were keen to promote their business ideas, projects in their early days seeking funding and advice, all the way to people who just wanted to hang out and have a chat with like-minded individuals.

For us, we made a lot of very valuable connections with heads of projects that we didn’t even know existed, met with some folks in high places that will go on to be beneficial contacts, and even held one very informal and unexpected job interview on the spot for a potential Coin Bureau candidate. We were quite impressed with the outcome and cannot wait to do it again next year.