Singapore’s F1 week is every taxi driver’s dream and every commuter’s nightmare. Every year, business visitors descend on the city state for annual conferences on energy, finance and technology, in the build-up to the Grand Prix.
TOKEN2049 Opens in Singapore; Line-Up Includes Tether, Goldman, Don Trump Jr.
1 October 2025 - 03:54 CEST
Crypto’s largest event, TOKEN2049, has piled in 25,000 attendees from 160 countries, according to the event organizers, elevating it to one of the main corporate fixtures of the week.
“You people have taken over the city, congratulations,” said the conference opening session’s master of ceremonies (to muted applause from delegates fresh out of the entrance queue).
Singapore: crypto capital
The iconic Marina Bay Sands venue hosts TOKEN2049 amongst more than 1,000 crypto-themed events, from investor forums to hackathons, organizers said in a 1 Oct statement. Singapore deserves the status, having driven forward crypto-related regulation and openly welcomed digital asset businesses. The Asian trading post had the highest cryptocurrency ownership rate in 2024, with 24.4% of the population owning crypto, according to a report by ApeX.
Headline speakers at TOKEN2049 include Donald Trump Jr., who co-founded World Liberty Financial along with his father, the incumbent US President, and brother, Eric.
Stellar line-up
Don Jr rotates the stage with Vlad Tenev, Chairman and CEO of Robinhood; Tom Lee, CIO of Fundstrat; Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether; Balaji Srinivasan, Founder of The Network State; and Arthur Hayes, CIO of Maelstrom, Star Xu and Haider Rafique of OKX.
TOKEN2049 also welcomes celebrities from sport: F1 race car drivers such as Lando Norris (McLaren Racing), Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), and Oliver Bearman (Haas) and former England international footballer John Terry are attending.
Don Jr behind closed doors
Don Jr saved his initial comments for a private invitation-only closed-door event alongside Mike Ho of Hut 8 to discuss its subsidiary, the Nasdaq-listed American Bitcoin mining venture. Trump is listed on the firm’s website as “stockholder,” while Eric is Chief Strategy Officer, with Ho as CEO.
Product announcements
Meanwhile, a handful of companies were more forthcoming with their announcements on day one of TOKEN2049:
- MEXC Ventures announced its second strategic investment in ENA, the governance token of the Ethena protocol, bringing the firm's total investment commitment to $30 million;
- XAUt0, the omnichain deployment of Tether Gold (XAUt), is now live on Celo, the Ethereum Layer 2;
- The Celo Foundation announced the launch of Nightfall, an open-source zero-knowledge privacy layer built by EY, now live as a Layer 3 on the Celo network;
- Digital Shield introduced its flagship hardware wallet, Digital Shield Pro;
- Hypersurface added covered calls on HyperEVM, bringing a TradFi yield strategy fully on-chain and accessible to everyday crypto users; and
- KuMining, a next-generation cloud mining platform incubated by KuCoin, also debuted.
