Web3 Festival attracts smaller crowd, greater enthusiasm in Hong Kong after record bitcoin price
- While there were fewer exhibitors this year, the Web3 Festival has attracted a more international crowd with 80 per cent of participants from outside the city
- Attendees offered glowing assessments of Hong Kong’s Web3 prospects despite the smaller crowd, weeks after bitcoin reached its highest price ever
Attendance is down, but enthusiasm is up at Hong Kong’s Web3 Festival this year amid sky-high bitcoin prices that have helped draw in an even greater proportion of overseas participants compared with last year.
The vast majority of participants – an estimated 80 per cent – came from outside Hong Kong, said Deputy Financial Secretary Michael Wong Wai-lun on Saturday in his opening remarks. The 2024 conference has seen more exhibitors from Europe and the US specifically, according to Lu Weiding, CEO of Wanxiang Group, which owns the event organiser HashKey Group.
As Hong Kong forges ahead with its push to transform into a major crypto hub, it has been attracting more Web3 events to the city and trying to bring in big-name speakers. Investor Cathie Wood, founder of US funds manager ARK Invest, was the most high-profile speaker at this year’s Web3 Festival, although she dialled in remotely for a video chat. She praised Hong Kong’s regulatory efforts and suggested the US is lagging behind.
“We are very impressed with what [Hong Kong] has done in providing a comprehensive regulatory framework for exchanges and institutions from a custody point of view,” Wood said in an onstage interview with HashKey Capital. “This regulatory clarity is critical, we think, to enabling the proliferation of the technology faster perhaps in Hong Kong than in the United States.”
Wood encouraged businesses in Hong Kong to take advantage of existing regulatory arbitrage as a “global opportunity”. She also offered an extremely optimistic view of where the price of bitcoin is headed: US$1.5 million by 2030. Its record price was more than US$73,000 on March 13 and currently sits around US$68,000.
This year’s Web3 Festival started shortly after the conclusion of the WOW Summit and the Liquidity 2024 Institutional Digital Asset Summit, which both dealt with crypto-related topics. Even more events are planned for later this year.
May will see both Wiki Finance Expo and Bitcoin Asia, and Chainlink will host its SmartCon event in Hong Kong in October. CoinDesk – recently acquired by crypto exchange Bullish, which has strong ties to the city – will bring its major Consensus conference to Hong Kong next year.
