Zyn and hustling in Las Vegas

Business Insider

06-06-2025

Quiet on set, people!" said Brock Pierce, the former child actor who grew up to be a prominent cryptocurrency entrepreneur. A hundred or so people sat in various states of conversation and intoxication at a Las Vegas Maggiano's that DNA Fund, a Pierce-founded venture, had rented out for several days during the official Bitcoin 2025 Conference last week.
We had just heard a bizarre speech from New York City's mayor, Eric Adams, who said Pierce and his colleagues in crypto were "pioneers" like Betsy Ross, who became a historical icon for stitching the first American flag featuring stars and stripes.
"So although the rockets' red glare and bombs burst in air, they proved through the night that our flag is still there," said Adams. "That is who you are. You are the best." Adams promised to start a crypto council for New York and to issue bitcoin bonds. He talked about how there's illegality with credit cards and fraud with the stock market. "Let's stop the bullshit and let's open doors," he said.
As Pierce again called for quiet on set, the volume of the banquet room chatter came down only slightly, as the assembled guests — crypto hustlers, bitcoin true believers, fintech founders, and a few journalists — realized that the end of the restaurant's main dining room had been quickly turned into a set for "CryptoKnights," the "Shark Tank"-for-web3 show that Pierce hosts alongside the former "Entourage" star Adrian Grenier on Amazon Prime. At Maggiano's, Pierce had assembled a panel of judges: Grenier was absent, but there were familiar reality-show archetypes in the form of a beautiful woman and a well-muscled Chad alongside Pierce, who was outfitted in a feathered panama hat. Soon they began filming. An aspiring crypto entrepreneur made his pitch — a way to earn yield on bitcoin — but after a few minutes of back-and-forth, Pierce and the judges shot him down. His product was only a concept. Not ready for prime time.
After the show, attendees enjoyed a three-course Maggiano's meal of family-style Italian staples. Pierce, a former business partner of Steve Bannon whose recent headlines tend to center on lawsuits over a hotel in Puerto Rico and his friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair, held court in a corner of the restaurant where Adams was also entertaining guests. Earlier that day, Pierce had hosted a fundraising luncheon with Adams, "Lunch With America's Bitcoin Mayor."
With some 35,000 attendees, the Bitcoin Conference at the Venetian hotel is the world's largest gathering in crypto. At the conference, officially put on by Bitcoin Magazine, the parties and side meetings like DNA Fund's romps at Maggiano's could be just as consequential as the main event, and they sometimes featured the same speakers. Adams, the Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-death guru Bryan Johnson, and the recently pardoned crypto executive Arthur Hayes all did double duty, appearing at the Venetian and at the Maggiano's confab down the road.
For entrepreneurs like Pierce, where life is a constant montage of networking, dealmaking, and self-publicizing via social media, it was just another day. DNA House has hosted events around the world, trailing large crypto gatherings in Toronto and the United Arab Emirates. And for many of his guests, gorging on wagyu beef stuffed shells and truffle mac and cheese, it was much the same: another alcohol-soaked party in a week filled with them, as the bitcoin faithful celebrated their ascendant political power.
More than anything, Bitcoin 2025 was a victory celebration for an industry that pushed all its chips in behind Donald Trump and the Republican Party during the 2024 election cycle and won handsomely. The first day, which was dubbed Code and Country, was so replete with Republican politicians, Trump staffers, and chest-thumping executives that it might've been mistaken for CPAC. Sponsored by America250, an ostensibly nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charged with planning the events making up the government's official 250th birthday celebration, the Code and Country program ended up revealing a lot about bitcoin's evolving position in American politics.
Bitcoin's adherents still tout foundational ideas like decentralization and a libertarian exit from society, but the MAGA and big-money tilt are unmistakable. As I saw on full and often surreal display over three days and nights in Vegas, the immediate future of bitcoin lies in the cryptocurrency industry's tight alignment with Trump, and its growth is now dependent on its adoption by large corporations, union retirement funds, the federal government, and a handful of billionaires racing to acquire as much of the stuff as they can.
Bitcoiners have always leaned right — challenging the state's monopoly on issuing money can do that — but it was a broadly libertarian right that included latter-day digital goldbugs, hard-money obsessives, anti-state sovereign citizens, and cypherpunks seeking some kind of supranational independence protected by the mathematical magic of encryption. The US president was not envisioned to be among this crew, and Trump famously denounced bitcoin as a "scam" during his first term.
But bitcoin's role in the world has changed dramatically in the 16-plus years since the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published a proposal for a peer-to-peer currency. Whole industries and vast political and criminal networks have grown up around bitcoin. During the conference, the value of a single token reached an all-time high of more than $111,000. For the Republican Party, bitcoin has become a proxy for freedom and a way of activating a motivated donor base that has already yielded major electoral gains.
As real money flooded into bitcoin, the cypherpunks were superseded by venture capitalists, money launderers, authoritarian tech billionaires, and a broad swath of the MAGA movement that saw bitcoin's general anti-government orientation as consistent with Trumpian populism. Many of them also saw it as a way to get rich. But the transformation of bitcoin's $2 trillion political economy has mostly left everyday retail traders behind. Even as bitcoin has soared in value, trading volume on exchanges has plummeted since its 2021 highs. It remains little used as a currency, with El Salvador, the one country to officially adopt bitcoin as a currency, scaling back its project.
In the 2024 election cycle, bitcoin's overwhelming partisan shift became impossible to ignore when the crypto industry raised more than $200 million to support Trump and a slate of largely Republican candidates. In return, the industry has seen the dismantling of crypto crime task forces across federal agencies; the loosening of financial regulation; the pardoning of the Silk Road drug market's founder, Ross Ulbricht; a reshuffling at the Securities and Exchange Commission; the veritable dismantlement of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; an end to most federal lawsuits and prosecutions against major crypto companies and individuals; the establishment of a national crypto stockpile that has the potential to buoy token prices; and, perhaps more surprisingly, the emergence of President Donald Trump as the country's most powerful crypto entrepreneur.
It's a dizzying turnabout for an industry that, last year, described itself as constantly on the defensive against a Democratic administration and regulatory state that it thought was bent on destroying it. Now, the main headache for many crypto CEOs isn't former SEC Chair Gary Gensler or Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Instead they must contend with the president himself, who, with his growing portfolio of crypto companies, has brought some unwelcome attention to an industry trying to force through Congress a friendly regulatory framework for dollar-pegged stablecoins — another business in which Trump has lately become involved.
Still, the Trumpian drama is worth it when the president has promised to give them the regulatory regime they want. Trump has pardoned a number of financial fraudsters and crypto executives, some of whom were feted in Vegas.
In Vegas, especially on the opening Code and Country day, the general feeling was of a gray-market industry being welcomed into the light and handed unprecedented influence. The sheer influx of Republican politicians spoke to that, with pro-crypto stalwarts like Sen. Cynthia Lummis, Rep. Tom Emmer, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Sen. Jim Justice, and Rep. Byron Donalds among many party notables appearing on panels. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had their turns on the main stage ("I truly believe we're just at the beginning. Opportunity abounds," said Trump Jr.), as did the White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks, the Trump advisor and campaign cochair Chris LaCivita, and the White House crypto advisor Bo Hines. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist, gave the day's opening keynote to a full crowd that began assembling at 5:30 a.m.
"Thanks in particular for what you did for me and the president," said Vance, explaining that the crypto industry's support was "part of the reason I'm standing here." He added: "With President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House."
"The innovators in this room are making people's lives better. You deserve respect and support from your government, not bureaucrats trying to tear you down," said Vance, to vigorous applause.
Bitcoin-themed Trump apparel was everywhere. Vendors sold Trump 2028 hats and posters of a hardened-looking Trump covered in bitcoin iconography. With crypto having just come in from the political cold, there was an undertone of subversion to it all. Someone wore a T-shirt that read "Everything I love to do is illegal." Another wore an ivory white suit decorated with the word TEXIT, in support of a Texas secession movement. A company called BitcoinOS was offering a lottery to win a foreign passport — probably from Portugal, though it wasn't yet decided. A number of accountants and financial advisors on the conference floor peddled tax-mitigation strategies, with the sign from Tax Network USA offering the brazen solicitation: "Ask Us About Tax Avoidance."
As Trump opened his second administration by pardoning convicted fraudsters while several SEC cases were put on hold, some crypto billionaires found it safe to visit the United States. The Bitcoin 2025 conference featured an appearance by one of those crypto entrepreneurs who had recently benefited from the SEC declining to pursue a multibillion-dollar fraud case it had prepared against him. Tron's founder, Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto billionaire, became the biggest investor in Trump's World Liberty Financial and the largest purchaser of the $Trump meme coin, which earned him a gold watch at Trump's recent gala for the top 220 owners of his token. A peripatetic executive who lives in Hong Kong and claims citizenship from St. Kitts & Nevis (he's also the prime minister of an unrecognized country called Liberland), Sun hadn't been seen in the US in years. But there he was at Bitcoin 2025, where he was applauded on the main stage and photographed with industry figures.
Equally feted was Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether, the world's largest stablecoin company, which operated in Hong Kong and the Caribbean for years before recently moving its headquarters to crypto-and-MAGA-friendly El Salvador. Ardoino gave a keynote speech and participated in a fireside chat on the main stage with Brandon Lutnick, the Cantor Fitzgerald executive who handles Tether's accounts, a position he inherited from his father, Howard Lutnick, Trump's commerce secretary.
"This year is your first time in the US," said Brandon Lutnick, more than once. Ardoino nodded. No one bothered to mention why Ardoino, who's 41, had never been to the States: His company had already reached multiple settlements with US regulators, and Ardoino and his colleagues were reportedly being investigated by the Department of Justice on suspicion of violating sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules, along with possible bank fraud (Ardoino said last year that he didn't think Tether was under criminal investigation). Before Trump's reelection, setting foot in the United States might have been a quick way for Ardoino to earn an interview with the FBI. Now, he and Sun were sought-after celebrities.
It wasn't just crypto's quasi-outlaw kingpins who were embracing a newfound freedom. Several speakers said that they had expected to be in jail this year — for what reasons, they didn't specify. The implication was less that they were operating on the margins of the law than that they were victims of government oppression — which only Trump could stop.
"Tyler, I think you mentioned that a year before that you thought it was much more likely that you'd be in the jailhouse than the White House," the cryptocurrency billionaire Cameron Winklevoss told his twin brother during a panel with David Sacks.
"I think the president appreciated that," said Sacks. "He similarly was facing lawfare a year ago, when his political enemies were trying to put him in prison for 700 years. I think he really understood the plight of the crypto community because they were being subjected to the same kind of unfair persecution that he was."
That night, America250 hosted a party at a pool club in the Resorts World Las Vegas complex. Companies like Exodus, Frax, Kraken, Coinbase, and Justin Sun's Tron were listed as sponsors. As guests walked in, a disembodied gloved hand reached through a black curtain, offering a complimentary flute of Champagne. The open bar provided generous pours, and the bathroom attendants had free Zyn. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, the legendary hip-hop group, came out for a performance. Rosie Rios, the chair of America250 who, on a conference panel that day, described herself as a "fiscal conservative," bobbed her head as they rapped about blunts and rum. The goldbug Peter Schiff, who, while facing tax and money laundering investigations over his private bank in Puerto Rico, has made a sideline out of media appearances sparring with bitcoiners, sat on a couch surrounded by a retinue of young women. Bottles of iced Moët rested on tables in poolside cabanas. (Schiff, who sued the IRS, has accused government authorities of conspiring to frame his bank.)
Bone Thugs transitioned into their song "1st of Tha Month" — a gold-charting, mid-'90s anthem celebrating the date when welfare checks arrive — as a group of women in cow costumes marched out carrying glowing signs that read "Steak 'n Shake" and "Accepts BTC." Above the stage, a large screen lit up with the Steak 'n Shake logo. A half-dozen suited Steak 'n Shake representatives looked on approvingly from behind a velvet rope.
This sort of hallucinatory marketing stunt — part of Steak 'n Shake's ongoing MAGA/ MAHA pivot, as the fast-food chain embraces beef tallow and bitcoin — was essentially standard fare for a week filled with constant offers, giveaways, pop culture callouts, and promises of easy riches and financial liberation. Everyone was hustling, selling, promising the world. "Earn Bitcoin While You Sleep," went a pitch from a mining company handing out branded fedoras. "Unlock Passive Income." The built environment, including some people's clothing and the napkins on tables, seemed overrun with QR codes. There was always another bitcoin raffle to enter or party to seek out, and the difference between what was legitimate and what wasn't could be a matter of interpretation.
The next night, at a wood-paneled bar on the 66th floor of the Conrad hotel, a crypto mining company called Digital Shovel threw a party with Maxim, the old lad mag. The names of both brands were printed across a blue curtain, in front of which guests and models hired from a local agency took photos. Asked about the role of Maxim in this venture, Scot Johnson, the president and CEO of Digital Shovel, told a group of journalists that he had rented the brand name for the evening.
Later, I ended up at a party for the Taproot Wizards, a kind of low-fi, deliberately unserious group of coiners who wish to "make bitcoin magical again." Walking into the psychedelically lit Discoshow venue at the Linq Hotel, I was handed a shiny silver wizard hat and cape, which I duly put on. A bearded man in full mage garb held out his hand, offering what looked like a brown capsule.
"Take it," he said.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It's drugs."
"Can I know which kind?"
"It's mushrooms."
I took it and enjoyed what seemed like the suspiciously familiar taste of a brown M&M.
Inside, the bar served free cocktails and cans of Liquid Death water. A few dozen people milled about in wizard clothes, the place emanating a "D&D fans throw a party" vibe. A handful of folks danced to a DJ set in a room so covered in screens and glowing panels that there was a seizure warning by the entrance. There was goofiness and some networking-free fun. No one seemed to be talking about bitcoin. And unfortunately, it was just an M&M.
In Vegas, the future of bitcoin was corporate. "Bitcoin treasury companies," publicly traded corporations that are essentially holding vehicles for accumulating bitcoin, were all the rage, as several CEOs took turns paying tribute to Michael Saylor, the tech executive who has borrowed billions of dollars to turn turn his enterprise software company MicroStrategy into one of the world's largest holders of bitcoin. Saylor has encouraged other companies to adopt his "playbook," and GameStop and Trump Media recently announced that they would follow suit. Nakamoto, the company whose name sat atop most Bitcoin 2025 conference branding and signage, is a bitcoin treasury company headed by David Bailey, the principal figure behind the conference.
In panel presentations, CEOs described future markets in which most companies would have bitcoin on their books, if not being explicitly devoted to it. Financial institutions and individual investors could then buy shares in those companies, like MicroStrategy and Metaplanet, which are publicly traded, and benefit from those companies' bitcoin exposure, broadening the circle of prosperity. A similar philosophy undergirded the growing adoption of ETFs, Wall Street funds that provide investors exposure to bitcoin without making customers go through the trouble of purchasing actual bitcoins. (These financial firms, in turn, benefit from the fees they reap from managing investments in ETFs, bitcoin treasury companies, and other crypto-based financial products.)
"At the end of the day, it's a game and we're all going to win together," said Fold CEO Will Reeves, whose company had recently begun building its bitcoin treasury.
"We're going to be the biggest companies in the world," said Simon Gerovich, the president of Metaplanet.
Saylor, the silver-haired 60-year-old executive whose self-described "religious" embrace of bitcoin has catalyzed this corporate treasury movement, was one of the conference's chief draws. His keynote, on the event's third and final day, was standing-room only. Wearing all black except for a silver bitcoin pendant that hung below his throat, Saylor emerged to rock-star-level applause. Speaking in his typically craggy voice, he preached a post-cypherpunk prosperity gospel under the unassuming title "21 Ways to Wealth." Acknowledging that he was used to speaking to top corporate executives and politicians, Saylor said he was happy to now be speaking to the people, bringing them the digital fire of Prometheus.
"Satoshi gave you an idea worth half of everything on earth," said Saylor. "The greatest idea in the history of the human race."
Scrolling through 21 instructive axioms — "master artificial intelligence," "domicile where sovereignty respects your freedom" — each accompanied by an AI-generated image, Saylor told his audience not to "chase your own good ideas." Only one pursuit mattered. Everyone listening should sell or mortgage everything they have, take out loans upon loans, and use it all to buy as much bitcoin as they could as quickly as possible. "Raise and reinvest capital relentlessly — velocity compounds wealth," read one slide. Saylor described how a dentist whose practice brought in a couple of hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue could theoretically — through a series of corporate maneuvers, loans, share sales, and lines of credit — become a bitcoin billionaire. Why aspire to be merely rich when you could be the "first billionaire dentist on your block," he said.
A constant on the bitcoin media circuit, Saylor talks in comically overwrought tones about bitcoin's power and perfection. He exhibits the personal commitment and persuasive abilities of the leader of a sophisticated multi-level marketing scheme. Over the past few years, Saylor has raised billions of dollars in debt to make periodic bitcoin purchases, MicroStrategy's stock has soared, and his once criticized thesis of constant corporate bitcoin accumulation is on the verge of being widely imitated. (Last year, Saylor agreed to pay $40 million to settle a tax fraud lawsuit filed by the Washington, DC, attorney general.)
"This is a race to capitalize on bitcoin," Saylor said, sounding far more zero-sum than the we're-all-going-to-win CEOs who had praised him hours earlier. "He who has the most bitcoin at the end of the game wins." The crowd cheered.
Ross Ulbricht, the speaker who followed Saylor, had attained practically mythological status among diehard bitcoiners. One of the first major dark web drug markets and a transformational event in bitcoin's history, the Silk Road provided it a clear use case: buying drugs online. As one former Silk Road customer turned crypto industry professional once told me, the Silk Road was the greatest onboarding event in bitcoin history. For years after Ulbricht received multiple life sentences without parole, coiners had lobbied for his release, until Trump pardoned him on January 21 of this year.
After an introductory video chronicling his years in prison followed by shots of him surfing, swimming, and diving into waterfalls, Ulbricht came out to warm applause. But the crowd had thinned since Saylor's commanding speech — some chairs sat empty — and would get thinner as Ulbricht went on. He tried to rouse the audience with a cry of "Freedom!" and a raised fist.
"I'm so, so thankful that we elected him and he is who he is," Ulbricht said of Trump. "He's a man of integrity."
However foundational Ulbricht had been to bitcoin's early growth, the movement seemed to have passed him by. In his speech, he acknowledged starting the Silk Road but said almost nothing about why he went to prison, the drug war, or the flawed criminal justice system (some Silk Road investigators were prosecuted for stealing evidence). There were some general appeals to principle, but it was a stilted, overlong presentation by a figurehead who seemed to have been far more appreciated when he was locked up out of view.
Ulbricht offered a stem-winding anecdote about renting a secluded cabin, where he planned to grow magic mushrooms for his nascent drug market. He found the cabin covered in seven wasp nests. The wasps reflected some of Ulbricht's most treasured principles — freedom and decentralization. But they lacked another, unity, which made it easy for him to destroy each nest in turn. What kind of unity Ulbricht was looking for wasn't clear.
No one seemed as jazzed about Ulbricht's stoic devotion to decentralization as they did about Saylor promising to share the everlasting cyberfire of half the world's wealth. The conference's closing keynote — an appearance by the bitcoin political cause celebre, on the 10th anniversary of his being sentenced to a lifetime in prison — ended with tepid applause and a rush to the exits. In a week of politically infused celebrations, this was supposed to be Ulbricht's moment. There had been a special lunch for him that day, one of many fundraisers since his release. The conference included the auctioning of his prison art and the jumpsuit he wore on the day of his release. "Free Ross," a mantra that had been printed on stickers handed out at every bitcoin event for a decade, had won. But bitcoin's top political prisoner, its once occluded hero, had bored a crowd with abstract talk of freedom and insects.
That night, I went to another bitcoin-related party at a nightclub in the Venetian. A healthcare recruiter in her late 40s named Jen, who lived in Atlanta, told me about converting her retirement account to bitcoin tokens and shares in bitcoin ETFs. A DJ played some recent hits while a mix of middle-aged coiners and Gen Z club kids swayed and pawed at each other's bodies. Some women in gravity-defying dresses danced on an elevated bar while velvet ropes denoted exclusive areas, where tables could run a couple of thousand dollars.
"I've had such a hard time orange-pilling my friends," she told me. But her bitcoin investments had gone up 140% in the past year. Wasn't that proof of something? She asked if I had done the same. I gave a halting answer about not investing in what I write about and not really having much of a retirement account anyway. She looked at me as if I were from another planet before her face adopted a look of profound concern.
"You have to do it."
I said I would.
Jacob Silverman