Crypto throws lap-dance party in middle of bear market

People lined up for blocks and waited for hours to get into the E11even club in Miami on Wednesday night, with several men talking excitedly about the lap dances they planned to get inside.

Yet this wasn't the typical crowd of bachelors normally found at establishments like these. It was the official after-party of Consensus, one of the cryptocurrency industry's largest conferences.

It seems the more things change in crypto, the more they stay the same: This was the same club that hosted an event after another crypto conference in 2018, triggering a backlash that led to apologies from the gathering's organiser and main sponsor.


"Some have said there was a 'corporate sheen' on this year's Consensus Miami event. But if that sheen is just covering up the speculative, irresponsible, degenerate culture that everyone hoped crypto was maturing out of post-FTX and other catastrophes, then TradFi will happily consume the entire industry," Amanda Wick, a former federal prosecutor turned crypto consultant, told Bloomberg. "As a gender equality advocate, the event was horrifying."

The celebratory mood inside E11even - where pole dancers gyrated to club music and servers in lingerie attended to guests - marked a stark contrast to the sentiment in the stock market toward the myriad of public companies that had listed shares on Wall Street in hopes of cashing in on the embrace of crypto by the Trump administration.