In the past year, cryptocurrency and blockchain conferences around the world have drawn hundreds of thousands of attendees. Many of these attendees have gone on to raise millions of dollars for their businesses. (Startups raised $5.6 billion through ICOs alone in 2017). Much of the networking and critical relationships are formed at these conferences.
But the question remains: who is it that’s attending? What’s the demographic makeup of this emerging space bent on anonymity that is responsible for what some call the greatest wealth transfer of our lifetime?
We used location data supplied to Fysical, a decentralized location data market, to find out.
We analyzed millions of anonymous location data points from the attendees of six major cryptocurrency and blockchain conferences to answer these questions.
Conferences analyzed:
We traced the origin of these conference attendees back to the zip code of their households, and cross referenced their zip code with public census data to create demographic statistics. It’s important to note that, while the conferences may have been concentrated in major coastal cities, they each drew a crowd that traveled from an average of 10 different states to attend. So, by no means is the analysis of a conference in San Francisco simply an analysis of those who live nearby; it’s actually made up of people who traveled from across the country to be there.
Among our findings we discovered that Blockchain Expo North America had attendees that came from neighborhoods that were both the wealthiest and most racially diverse.
MOST RACIALLY DIVERSE: Blockchain Expo North America
Blockchain Expo North America drew a crowd that came from neighborhoods that were on average 48% Caucasian, 26% Asian, and 23% Hispanic, among top ethnic groups. This represents a far more diverse group than the typical +60% Caucasian, and sub-20% Asian/Hispanic ethnic groups that comprised the other conference attendees’ neighborhoods were comprised of.
HIGHEST AVERAGE INCOME: Blockchain Expo North America
Blockchain Expo North America is a standout once again, but this time in the average earnings of attendees’ neighborhoods at $140k / year. This is far greater than the average of $116k / year we saw across all six conference attendees’ hometowns.
LOWEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: Token Summit
The attendees of Token Summit came from neighborhoods in which the average unemployment rate was 6.2%, versus the average of 6.9% seen across all conference attendees’ neighborhoods.
MOST POST-GRADUATE DEGREES: Blockchain Conference
These attendees came from neighborhoods in which 33% of the population had a post-graduate or professional degree. This is in stark contrast to the average 22% across all the conferences attendees’ neighborhoods we analyzed.
Fysical is a decentralized location data market. It provides infrastructure for the transparent and compliant trade of location data on the blockchain.
Fysical is a project by Fysical Technologies Pte. Ltd., a Singapore company.
