TOKEN2049 in Singapore left attendees with different impressions, but a common thread ran through many of them: there were still plenty of people, events and meetings, yet fewer new projects, fewer builders, and more institutions, traders, KOLs and capital on the ground. A recurring view was that crypto is no longer judged mainly by who tells the best story. The questions now are about real users, real revenue, real assets and real liquidity.
Across the notes shared by participants, the main venue looked increasingly like a traditional finance conference. Stablecoins, payments, real-world assets, privacy, perpetuals and prediction markets took center stage, while AI and decentralized AI remained one of the biggest variables for builder circles.
0xJeff: fewer builders, more institutions, but DeAI still stands out
0xJeff documented his observations over three days at TOKEN2049.
On day one, he said 90% of conversations revolved around RWA, tokenized equities and structured products, which he framed as the institutionalization of crypto. The other 10% touched AI, the financialization of compute and putting everything on-chain. He also noticed that venture funds, liquidity funds and traders were talking about Grass and were bullish on it, while Venice, Near, Pumpfun and Orbio came up repeatedly.
In his view, most people still do not realize the on-chain and DeAI wave that is unfolding, and many do not understand the value proposition behind on-chain or decentralized inference, x402 and the emerging market for tokenized inference credit. He said many teams are building front ends, trading platforms, AI agent trading strategy platforms and structured product protocols around Hyperliquid, Ondo and Polymarket. More people are moving on-chain because the user experience has improved, and tokenized assets offer things traditional brokerages do not, including 24/7 trading, collateralization, lending yield, basis trades and more flexible portfolio construction.
Even so, his overall impression was that the crowd was down by more than 50% from prior years. There were fewer builders, more traders, investors, KOLs and institutions, and much less retail excitement.
On day two, that feeling only strengthened. The main venue was dominated by exchanges, custody firms, payments, stablecoin infrastructure and new banks. He said many investors had turned bearish on crypto, or at least neutral, sitting on cash and holding only one or two positions they believed in. The reasoning, as he described it, was that DeFi has matured, the winners are already visible, and NFT and meme narratives are fading. Only a small set of narratives and teams looked ready for the next leg up, namely AI, privacy, RWA and payments.
He also noted a split in sentiment: eastern whales were more pessimistic, while western whales were more optimistic.
On day three, at the gm AI v2 event, he said he finally felt the builder energy he remembered from 2023. Discussions around AI, privacy, robotics, DePIN, decentralization and tokenomics returned. He also saw long-time industry teams shifting direction, with some moving into the China AI market and relocating offices to Shenzhen, some combining AI with gaming and consumer content, and others focusing on social trading and privacy AI.
One thing stood out to him: despite heavy discussion of quantum computing on X, almost nobody was talking about it on the ground at TOKEN2049. On the market, bears were mainly worried about the macro backdrop and the four-year cycle thesis, while bulls were focused on crypto’s institutionalization and its potential to merge with TradFi as part of global financial infrastructure. Builders, he said, are now more focused on business fundamentals, especially how to increase user spending, align incentives through token design and use x402 to speed up product launches.
His conclusion was direct: on-chain or decentralized AI is one of the most asymmetric and fastest-growing areas in crypto over the next two years. The main venue may be getting more institutional, but the most interesting new research directions are still showing up in conversations among AI builders.
Rocky: exchanges are moving toward AI-driven personalization
Trader Rocky attended a small Binance gathering and said the information density was high. He also came away with the sense that Binance is paying close attention to AI.
His main takeaway was that exchanges are heading toward a highly personalized model. Today, users open the same exchange and largely see the same interface and functions. In the future, he said, AI will understand user needs much more deeply. Users who prefer futures may see more derivatives data and strategy tools. Options traders may get information better suited to options decisions. Yield-focused users may see returns, risk and allocation tools. New users may be given a simpler onboarding path with a lower learning curve.
As AI gets better at understanding habits and preferences, he said, finding information, locating functions and making decisions should become easier. In that setup, competition among exchanges will not be limited to token listings, liquidity and fees. It will also depend on who understands users better and can build those needs directly into the product.
Bennie: fewer projects, and more alpha in offline networks and long-term thinking
Bennie’s first impression was that the number of crypto projects is visibly shrinking. From what he saw in person, there were fewer new projects worth paying attention to than before. The market had already grown tired of VC-backed tokens and shifted toward shell plays, but with listings becoming harder, the assembly-line model of organizing, issuing and listing tokens is becoming more difficult. On the other hand, he said, shells with resources, channels and narrative capacity may become more valuable, and a market focused specifically on trading shells has already appeared.
The area he is most bullish on is RWA, especially infrastructure tied to U.S. equities. In the past, RWA was mostly about tokenized Treasuries. Now, with U.S. equity perpetuals, 24/7 trading and price discovery outside traditional hours, the movement of traditional financial assets and trading infrastructure into crypto is becoming more obvious. Platforms such as Robinhood are bringing traditional finance users into crypto, while Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 has made more people aware of the potential for putting traditional assets on-chain.
He also argued that the era of traditional agencies making money from information asymmetry is ending. AI is rapidly lowering the cost of research, content production and information access. Work that once required a full team can now be done by a few people using AI. Agencies that only sell labor or access will have a harder time. He said the roles worth watching are advisor or CMO-style operators who are deeply involved in growth, along with new go-to-market models built around crowdsourced content, UGC and short-video matrices.
For offline networking, Bennie suggested paying attention to the people at the table who are not talking much. In his view, real alpha often does not come from the people who are best at introducing or packaging themselves, but from those who stay low-key and actually have substance. By contrast, if someone keeps loudly talking about what they have done, he said, they are probably just BD.
He also encouraged people to pitch projects they genuinely like. Many founding teams are on site, and partnerships often start with a direct conversation.
He closed with several practical suggestions:
- showoff > execute: everyone should build a social media presence. If you like thinking, publish research and put your views out. If you are a marketer, try video, content and different forms of expression to show what makes you different.
- Use AI well. He said most people have developed less than 1% of its potential.
- Plan a second identity or overseas visa early, because TOKEN2049 will be held in New York in 2027, and crypto resources and liquidity are moving closer to the U.S.
He added that if someone is not an industry participant and has no networking need, but is only trading tokens or interested in technology, there may be little reason to attend in person. Asking AI directly could be more efficient.
Yue Xiaoyu: the main venue felt like a business bureau, the BNB Chain venue like a Chinese community fair
Yue Xiaoyu based her observations on two settings: the TOKEN2049 main venue and the BNB Chain venue. Her clearest impression was that they felt like two separate circles.
She said roughly 80% of attendees at the main TOKEN2049 venue were from overseas, and the most common booths belonged to exchanges and crypto payment projects. The overall atmosphere was closer to a setting for project teams, institutions and business partnerships. At the BNB Chain venue, by contrast, around 80% of attendees were Chinese, and participants were more likely to be KOLs, traders and large holders. Projects there were also more concentrated within the BNB ecosystem, including meme coins, stablecoin payments, on-chain contracts and prediction markets.
In her words, if the main TOKEN2049 venue was a business bureau for industry projects, the BNB Chain venue was more like an amusement fair for Chinese crypto players.
She said the people who proactively approached her at the main venue fell into three groups:
- Crypto payment providers: two-way fiat and crypto payment solutions are already relatively mature, and compliant on- and off-ramps plus localized payment infrastructure are becoming a necessity for projects expanding overseas.
- Regional marketing agencies: firms that can handle promotion in Europe, the Americas and Africa. She said it was clear that going global now requires refined local operations, because countries and regions differ sharply and market expansion methods vary a lot.
- Other project teams and industry participants: these contacts may not convert directly, but they can still bring brand awareness and exposure within the right circles.
She also contrasted online and offline sentiment. Online communities are full of market noise and negative emotion, and people are anxious. Offline, many operators, users and partners are still actively looking for reliable projects, building relationships and pushing cooperation. Her takeaway was that online opinion is driven by emotion and price action, while offline events are driven by value and networks.
On whether projects should exhibit, she said early-stage teams should not rent a booth at the main venue because the ROI is low. For fast-growing or mature projects, a booth makes sense, not for direct conversion but for brand display and industry exposure.
Still, she said attending in person matters whether or not a team rents a booth. Ten online conversations are not equal to one face-to-face meeting. Trust remains the scarcest resource in crypto.
Bitcoin Orange Trader: as L2 cools, PoW plus AI is back in the conversation
Bitcoin Orange Trader said one thing he noticed at the event was that while L2 projects such as Blast and Abstract have shut down one after another, PoW projects are being discussed again.
During TOKEN2049, one project that drew attention in overseas circles was Pearl. The project is trying to answer a long-standing question: can AI compute provide real inference services while also mining a bitcoin-like currency on the side?
He said PoW plus AI has a chance to become a new narrative, but what determines how far PRL can go is not the technology alone. The key question is whether AI companies are actually willing to pay for that compute over the long term. Making AI compute mine a token is one technical achievement. Making that token into an asset the market truly wants to hold is a different business altogether.
Joe Zhou: stablecoins took center stage as crypto moved toward substance
Foresight News reporter Joe Zhou has attended TOKEN2049 in Singapore for four straight years. His biggest takeaway this year was that stablecoins became the central theme of the conference.
He said nearly one-third of booths were related to stablecoins. In his view, stablecoins have already formed a large and complex industry chain, and even small companies can become leaders in narrow segments.
He also heard a number of concrete data points:
- One stablecoin payments company has enabled QR payments in 18 countries, with notable growth in Indonesia and Brazil.
- One stablecoin wallet had more than 100,000 users complete payments in real-world scenarios last month, with average monthly payment volume of more than $100 per user.
- Stripe partnered with Shopify to let U.S. merchants accept stablecoin payments.
- Stripe also partnered with Meta so creators in Latin America and Southeast Asia can choose to receive platform income in stablecoins.
At the same time, he said that while AI agent payments were discussed widely, his conversations with multiple stablecoin companies suggested there is still no sign of scaled adoption.
His second major observation was that crypto is moving away from abstraction and toward real business. The phrase he heard most often this year was “value capture.” In the past, crypto liked to talk about narratives, vision, TVL and active addresses. This year, people were asking where the users are, where revenue comes from, where profits go and what value token holders actually capture.
He said five sectors in crypto are starting to look durable: public blockchains and DeFi, exchanges, stablecoins, perp DEXs and prediction markets. What they share is that users do not use them to support a grand narrative. They use them because these products provide clear financial services.
Even so, he said the industry still has a habit of reinventing the wheel. There are more perp DEXs, more prediction markets and more stablecoin chains, and a new wave of chain-building is taking shape. Whether the market really needs that many public chains remains an open question.
His conclusion was that this was the most restrained TOKEN2049 he has attended. Crypto participants are talking less about stories and more about real business, real revenue and value capture.
Crypto Chris: beneath the surface buzz, opportunities for ordinary participants are shrinking
Crypto Chris attended TOKEN2049 for the first time. He skipped the main venue and focused on side events and dinners. For him, the biggest gain was a renewed sense that in the AI era, offline human connection matters more. Face-to-face communication remains the warmest and easiest way to build trust.
But he also felt what he called a false prosperity. Attendance was high, even above Hong Kong Consensus and the Web3 Carnival, yet the industry’s underlying problems were still obvious. In a new cycle shaped by faster integration with traditional finance, crypto-native narratives have almost disappeared. Everyone is searching for opportunities, but the opportunities available to ordinary people are getting smaller. Under the surface excitement, he said, there is more anxiety.
The areas he heard discussed most were tokenized equities, perpetuals, prediction markets and payments. These sectors are also starting to overlap. He pointed to Polymarket moving into perpetuals and Hyperliquid moving into prediction markets, and said on-chain options may be the next area worth watching.
For KOLs, he said the market has become harder. There are fewer projects, lower budgets, less advertising, and it is increasingly difficult to rely on traffic and exposure alone. The people who will still be remembered are those with hard capabilities: a distinct personal brand, a stable business model, trading skill, content skill and the ability to stay in the field for the long term.
His own strategy is to keep working around the primary market, improve both trading and content, strengthen spoken English, stay physically fit and keep betting on himself. He also said Singapore is very friendly to Chinese participants and crypto people, and that identity planning and overseas expansion will remain long-term issues.
Yishabei Payment: the most useful information is usually offstage
Yishabei approached TOKEN2049 from the payments angle. She had expected fewer new projects and a smaller crowd this year, but because the Dubai edition was canceled, Singapore became the only flagship event of the year. Combined with the F1 weekend, Marina Bay was packed.
The most common words she heard were still RWA, perpetuals, AI agents and stablecoin payments. But she said there was not much that felt genuinely new. In the past, people competed to find the next opportunity first. Now they are competing for share within the same opportunity.
She said the biggest change this year was that institutions were no longer just observing. They were taking positions directly. Nasdaq, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley all appeared on the agenda, which in her view showed that competition in hot sectors is shifting from discovering new narratives to fighting for real users, capital and distribution.
Her most important takeaway was that the most useful information is usually not on stage but off stage. On stage, speakers talk about global coverage, big narratives and trend calls. Off stage, people talk about the actual bottlenecks:
- Stablecoin rails get stuck on local banking relationships and settlement cycles.
- Some perp order-book depth is manufactured and disappears once support is pulled.
- When AI services try to charge in stablecoins, merchant reconciliation and refund flows do not connect properly.
- The biggest issue for RWA projects is not how fast assets can be put on-chain, but whether accountability exists if the asset runs into trouble.
As someone working in payments, she said the key questions are simple: how money comes in, how it goes out, and who is responsible when something breaks.
She also said projects working with market makers should ask several specific questions:
- Are the tokens borrowed or funded with the market maker’s own capital?
- How is the strike price set on any option attached to borrowed tokens?
- Is performance judged by order-book depth or by trading volume?
- Can the trading volume be washed?
- Can the depth actually be maintained?
Those details do not show up in keynote speeches, but they determine whether a project has built real liquidity or only the appearance of it.
She also raised security concerns. On the opening day of TOKEN2049, trader Frogman reported that two wallets had been compromised, with losses of about $4 million. There is currently no evidence linking the incident to conference activity, but she said it was still a reminder that in a highly concentrated social setting, trust forming too quickly is itself a risk.
Her advice was straightforward: do not scan random QR codes, do not click unknown links, and do not casually connect wallets or sign approvals. Keep social devices separate from devices used to sign large-value transactions, and use small wallets when testing new products.
Her conclusion was that the real mine to dig at TOKEN2049 is not the next 100x token, but the problems that still have not been solved.
Jade’s RWA notes: without RWA, DeFi may not go very far
Jade said he heard one line at TOKEN2049 that stuck with him: “Without RWA, DeFi is a dead end.” The quote came from Superstate founder Jim Hiltner. Jade said the wording was spicy, but he thinks it captures a real issue DeFi has to face in its next phase.
Why might DeFi stall? His answer was that DeFi’s TVL has historically been little more than a shadow of native token prices. If TVL rises and falls with token prices, then the scale of DeFi is not being driven by real demand. The same problem exists on the yield side. On-chain yield has largely come from leverage demand in crypto assets. In bull markets, people borrow to lever up and rates rise. In bear markets, or when traditional risk-free rates are attractive, capital leaves DeFi.
If 10-year U.S. Treasury yields are already attractive, safe and large in scale, then DeFi cannot keep deposits simply by offering a higher number. It needs more high-quality real assets.
Jade said RWA is already becoming a source of incremental growth for DeFi. In Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market, perpetuals tied to real-world assets already account for a meaningful share of trading. On Solana, both the scale of RWA assets and the number of holding addresses are growing quickly. Asset types are also expanding from Treasuries and money market funds into private credit, reinsurance and royalty funds. Because these assets are less correlated with the crypto market, they fill a gap DeFi has long had.
Still, he stressed that RWA without DeFi is only an on-chain shell. Many tokenized assets are not actually being used after issuance. Among tokenized equities and tokenized funds, the share that truly enters DeFi, becomes collateral or participates in portfolio strategies is still low.
In his view, the RWA best suited for DeFi will not be every asset class. It will be assets with relatively stable returns, assets ordinary users do not usually have access to, assets that can serve as collateral, and assets that can create sustained on-chain demand.
He said there are three main reasons RWA and DeFi have not really connected yet:
- Liquidity: RWA often comes with T+1, T+2 or even slower redemption cycles, making on-chain lending markets reluctant to accept it as collateral.
- Rate structure: institutions need fixed rates and fixed terms, but on-chain fixed-income markets still lack depth.
- Institutional access: Wall Street will not enter DeFi as a plain depositor. It will come in as a borrower, issuer or asset manager, and it will require KYC, permissioning and legally enforceable arrangements.
His conclusion was that the phase of DeFi serving only crypto assets is nearing its end. The next phase will not be a contest over simple TVL. It will be about which real assets can become collateral, whether fixed-rate markets can gain depth, whether institutions can access DeFi in a way they recognize, and whether tokenized real-world assets are actually used once they are on-chain.