🌎 Everyone Should Benchmark LatAm Conferences

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🏟️ On the Current State of Crypto Events

At Frontera we think it's obvious that crypto events are broken. 

There, we said it.

And we're coming with receipts, two recent conferences in Latin America over the last eight months made it painfully obvious.

This past weekend, Ab traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, as a speaker at Moneycon, an educational event focused on finance organized by Mis Propias Finanzas. 

For those of you not familiar with them, Mis Propias Finanzas is, as they call themselves, a community/school/movement with the sole purpose of helping people take control of their financial lives. And, to be clear, this is not a sponsored mention, Ab was just flabbergasted after attending the event.

Check out the recap we did at Espacio Cripto if you'd like to see what it was like.

More than 6,000 people paid $60 to attend. There were two main stages that could hold more than 1,000 people, four full-size auditoriums for 600, and a dozen classrooms that fit between 50 and 200. 

And every, single, space, was, full.

The crowd showed up early, stayed late, packed the rooms, paid for their own food, and took notes. They just wanted to learn. 

On the other side of the spectrum, we also saw Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference in 2025, a very different event with a very different crowd. 

Around 2,000 people attended, each paying roughly $150 USD, and the event was tailored entirely for institutions. Yet, if you ask anyone who went they’ll tell you it was the best crypto event of 2025.

So these two experiences got us thinking about the current state of crypto conferences…

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🚨 What’s Broken About Crypto Conferences

We expect everything to be free. We expect everything to be easy. When I say we I mean the community as a whole, myself included.

And I’m not talking about just events here.

People publicly pray for the downfall of a protocol (and the CEOs family) if their free airdrop is not enough or drops in price. I know it’s on a case-by-case basis and some teams are S-tier grifters, but it’s what we as an industry have grown accustomed to. This is the culture we’ve allowed to take root, and conferences reflect that same energy.

Most people attending crypto events today go solely because of the vibes and the parties. It’s become hard to quantify their real impact when everything that matters happens behind closed doors, in private meetings, or after the panels end.

On the other hand, at Moneycon, people paid for their tickets. They paid for their food. And still, every single room was full.

Lessons in there.

🔧 What We Can Improve

It all starts with intention. Both Moneycon and Bitso’s event succeeded because they were designed with purpose, and the audience responded with attention.

Organizers have to ask themselves what exactly they are optimizing for, and stick to it.

MoneyCon optimized for learning, and it changed the attendees lives through the content delivered, literally, check out min 2:25 of our recap.

Bitso’s event optimized for concentrated outcomes. It was built for people who were there to get something done. Founders and execs from Bridge, Base, Rain, and dozens more spent real time inside the conference walls. There was no flurry of side events dragging people out of the main room, and it certainly made a difference.

When I said at the start those who attended would tell you this was the best crypto event of the year, I meant it. It has nothing to do with the team being Mexican or Ab working at Bitso, the event was truly on another level.

So if you’re organizing an event this year, whether you’re targeting retail or builders, look at these two. Study their intent. Study their design. Mis Propias Finanzas set the bar for consumer education in our eyes, even if it’s still under the radar in the crypto scene. Bitso, without a doubt, set the bar for B2B alignment.

There’s also a question we should all sit with:

What if the simple act of charging for attendance makes people actually care?

In Bogotá, they charged $60. In CDMX, it was $150. These weren’t ultra high prices, but they made people commit. What if instead of having a, say 35,000 people conference, we just go smaller, target 3,000 invested individuals and everything works better.

We won’t know until we try.

🪙 Stablecoins

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🇧🇲 Bermuda

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🇮🇷 Iran

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