LinkedIn pulled down a post about an official Consensus 2026 Miami event for violating its Professional Community Policies. The event itself was sponsored by some of the biggest names in crypto. Mainstream media have so far largely ignored the story, and most sponsors are deafeningly silent. So, how did we get here?
Amanda Wick, a crypto compliance expert and the founder of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, posted a video last week from what was billed as the “Official After Party” of Consensus 2026 in Miami. The event promised the place “where the conference ends and the real conversations begin. The ones that turn into partnerships. The ones that turn into wire transfers.”
What it delivered, according to multiple attendees who shared video and accounts with Wick, was strippers, naked dancers, and aggressive pitches for lap dances in private rooms on the way to the restroom. LinkedIn removed her post. Then a second post, with only a still photo. Both were flagged for violating the platform’s Professional Community Policies.
Sit with that for a second.
A professional networking platform deemed the documentation of an official industry event too explicit for its users. And yet that same event was sanctioned, sponsored, and promoted as the place where institutional partnerships get made.
If the video is too inappropriate for LinkedIn, how was the event itself appropriate enough to be the official closing event for Consensus Miami?
The 2018 Test, and How We Failed It
This is not crypto’s first encounter with this exact problem. In 2018, the North American Bitcoin Conference rented out Miami strip club E11EVEN for an “official networking” party. The backlash was swift and loud. The industry, we were told, had learned.
Eight years later, at a conference the Wall Street Journal described as having a “corporate sheen,” the same playbook ran with the same vendors in the same city, and the response has been close to silence.
That silence is the actual story.
In 2018, people were outraged. In 2026, people are tired, or numb, or have simply accepted that this is what crypto in America looks like now. As Wick put it, we may be frogs slow-cooking in a pot, coming to terms with an industry that is less “future of finance” and more Biff Tannen’s casino from Back to the Future Part II.
The Sponsorship Question
Consensus is not a fringe gathering. It is a bellwether event, produced by CoinDesk, owned by Bullish, and run by Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange. Its sponsors at this year’s after-party reportedly included Dentons and Gamma Prime, among others, who contributed roughly $90,000 to the event. Consensys, initially listed as a sponsor, publicly disavowed the event after criticism surfaced, stating it was not a sponsor.
That response from Consensys, via X, is worth noting. It is the kind of public accounting other named sponsors have so far declined to offer.
These are not anonymous fly-by-night operations. These are the firms, lawyers, and infrastructure providers asking Congress, the SEC, and institutional allocators to take crypto seriously as the future of finance.
So the question is straightforward: did the executives writing those checks know what their dollars were funding? And if they did, do they think it was a reasonable use of marketing budget for a company whose pitch to lawmakers is “trust us with the financial system”?
Brent Fulfer of TBV, one of the event organizers, responded to criticism on X with what Wick generously called “honesty”: if attendees did not want to see strippers, they should have paid more to come earlier in the evening. Always be hustling.
At least that is candid. The harder question is whether Tom Farley at Bullish and CoinDesk, Joe Guagliardo at Dentons, and Evan Szumigala at Gamma Prime are prepared to be similarly candid about whether this is what they signed up for.
“It Felt Like Reposting Adult Content on LinkedIn”
When Wick’s LinkedIn post started circulating, people messaged her to ask if the video was real. They could not believe it. Several told her they were too uncomfortable to repost it themselves. One described the experience as feeling like reposting adult content on a professional platform.
When your “official after-party” video is mistaken for adult content, you may want to reconsider your marketing choices. Unless, of course, that was the marketing.
One commenter on X responded to Wick’s original post, arguing that this kind of event “probably attracts institutional money more than any other.” He may be right. That is the depressing part.
If the industry’s pitch to serious capital really does run through hyper-sexualized after-parties, then the people in suits in the daytime sessions are running cover for something else entirely.
The “corporate sheen,” to borrow the Wall Street Journal’s phrase, apparently wears off at sunset.
The Argument Crypto Is Trying to Win
Look, I have worked on and around Wall Street and the broader industry for longer than I care to admit. I have been excited about crypto since 2016, back when it felt genuinely revolutionary, when it put power back in people’s hands, or more accurately, their wallets. I loved the decentralization of it. It was a rare corner of finance that brought liberals and libertarians together around a shared purpose. Finance 2.0. It was grand.
So no, I am not trying to be Pollyanna about any of this. Things happen at conferences. People make choices in the late hours that they would not put on a business card. That has always been true, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
But there is a meaningful difference between what happens after the official program ends, in the quieter hours, on someone’s own time and someone’s own dime, and what gets stamped as the “Official After Party” of the industry’s flagship conference, promoted on the agenda, and underwritten by household-name sponsors. The first is human behavior; the second is a marketing decision.
Crypto is in the middle of the most consequential lobbying push in its history. Stablecoin legislation, market structure bills, the SEC’s evolving posture, banking access, all of it depends on convincing Washington and institutional capital that the FTX era was an aberration and that what comes next is responsible, institutional, and worthy of being woven into the financial system.
It is genuinely difficult to make that argument when your flagship conference’s official after-party would not pass muster at a mid-tier investment bank’s holiday party.
This is not a side issue, nor a “women’s issue,” though women in the industry have been shouldering the burden of raising it. It is a basic question of whether crypto wants to be taken seriously, or whether “this is just crypto” will continue to do the work of an apology.
You cannot ask Congress to entrust you with the future of finance on Tuesday and then sponsor an event on Wednesday night that LinkedIn will not let you talk about on Thursday morning. Think about that.
What a Real Response Looks Like
There is a version of this story in which the sponsors named above issue statements clarifying what they understood their dollars to fund and what they will require of event organizers going forward. There is a version in which CoinDesk and Bullish, as the entities that own and produce Consensus, draw a clearer line on what qualifies as an “official” event. And there is a version, already underway among a growing number of men in the industry who have used their platforms to call this out, that becomes the norm rather than the exception.
There is also a version where everyone shrugs, the sponsorship checks clear, and the same thing happens at Consensus 2027.
If the latter, then we have an answer to Wick’s question. The industry is not better than this. It is exactly this. And the rest of us, including the people writing the rules in Washington, should plan accordingly.
Anyone named in this piece, sponsors, organizers, executives, or attendees with a different account, is welcome to respond. If I have gotten something wrong, I will correct it. If you have a different account of what your dollars funded or what you understood the event to be, I want to hear it.
