IT’S THE SIXTH annual Black Blockchain Summit, and organizers are quietly removing a couple rows of chairs from the room. The Howard University auditorium we’re in looks a third empty. There are at most 100 people in the crowd today—a far cry from the 1,500 who attended the summit over three days last year, when Sam Bankman-Fried was still hailed as crypto’s boy wonder.
Now, in late September, he’s weeks away from being convicted for an $8 billion fraud scheme. Meanwhile, the price of Bitcoin has been staggering back up from post-FTX fallout. The public reputation of crypto and its promoters has not recovered.
Despite this, the mood in the room is cheery, like a crypto homecoming weekend. There’s a table with free T-shirts reading “Satoshi Is Black.” If the summit’s agenda is to be trusted, crypto and blockchain still have formidable power to financially liberate Black people. Also to potentially end poverty, disrupt the prison-industrial complex, mitigate environmental injustice, and supercharge political dissidence.