(Bloomberg) — No name tags and by invitation only, an exclusive cryptocurrency crowd is gathering behind closed doors at the Waldorf Astoria’s Jean-Georges restaurant in Beverly Hills.
It’s Medici LA 22, an event set up to connect crypto entrepreneurs and institutional investors amid the ballooning popularity of digital assets. The who’s who of crypto are attending, with Mike Novogratz, chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, among the 130 or so at the two-day meeting. The goal is to generate “actionable investment ideas” in the digital asset world, according to a copy of the conference’s program seen by Bloomberg News.
And by all accounts, tickets for the event are hard to come by. A few hundred meters away, a separate confab is in full swing but some participants at the Milken Global Institute Conference — a mainstay event for the U.S. investing world — are wondering how they can get access to the parallel cryptocurrency gig.
That’s even as Milken hosts its own digital asset offering — perhaps its most expanded yet — with several crypto-related panels, including two on the metaverse and one on digital nationalism. Crypto executives, investors and developers such as Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase Global Inc. attended at the Beverly Hilton.
Other participants at Medici, which began on Monday at a separate hotel, include Kanav Kariya, president of Jump Crypto, Mary-Catherine Lader, chief operating officer of Uniswap Labs, Adam Jackson, CEO of Braintrust and Mihailo Bjelic, co-founder of Polygon. Attendees, who don’t have to wear name tags, are discussing scaling and infrastructure, markets and DeFi, web3 and regulation and policy. Medici events are free for invited guests, according to the program.
The Medici Network was set up about five years ago by Adam Winnick, founding partner of Finality Capital Partners and an early entrant into the crypto world. Winnick started his career on Wall Street at CIBC working on high-yield financing, according to his profile on LinkedIn. Michael Milken, the Milken Institute’s founder and billionaire “Junk Bond King” helped turn high-yield debt from a backwater of risky corporate debt into a trillion-dollar market. High-yield bonds had inspired Winnick, he said.
“At the time, high-yield bonds were a novel asset class that institutions could not buy. They were, however, an invaluable financial instrument for founders building new networks cable, mobile, fiber optics,” he said in the conference’s program. “Today, tokens are the novel instrument that are bootstrapping a whole new group of networks and we are proud to support that effort.”
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