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This “Crypto City” guide looks at New York City’s crypto culture, its most notable projects and people, its financial infrastructure, which retailers accept crypto, and where you can find blockchain education courses — and there’s even a short history of the controversial regulatory regime required to operate in the city.
Fast facts
City: New York
Country: United States
Population: 8.8 million
Established: 1624
Most common languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and many more
New York City is a bustling metropolis in the American state of New York. The city is divided into five separate boroughs — the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island — each with its own unique geography and culture. While the state’s capital is Albany, NYC is its most widely known city and is one of the most famous cities in the world.
The most populous city in the United States, NYC is home to an estimated 8.8 million people, with an additional 1 million people traveling to the city every day for work (pre-pandemic). In 2019, the city also welcomed nearly 70 million tourists seeking to take in the bright lights of Times Square, see a Broadway musical, visit the Empire State Building, and enjoy NYC’s dining and nightlife, among the many other sites and attractions the city offers.
New York City has been the setting for countless major films and television shows, which adds to its attraction as a tourist destination. Some of the most famous movies filmed in NYC include The Godfather, Ghostbusters, King Kong, Taxi Driver, West Side Story, Goodfellas, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Saturday Night Fever and many, many others. Sitcom classics Seinfeld and Friends were set in the city, and the long-running live sketch show Saturday Night Live broadcasts every weekend from 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
With Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange located in lower Manhattan, the city is generally recognized as the financial capital of the United States, perhaps even the world. It’s also the nation’s fashion capital and one of its major technology, music, film and television hubs. Home to around 3 million immigrants, NYC is widely known for its cultural diversity, with the Statue of Liberty famously inscribed with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The city’s status as a hot location for crypto and blockchain culture has a lot to do with it being a major junction where finance and technology meet, according to Michael Moro, CEO of digital asset prime brokerage Genesis: “New York City has always been the epicenter of the capital markets and, over time, has earned a global reputation for being an innovation and technology hub.”
NYC is also a very wealthy city. “The advantage of the city is really Wall Street, right?” says Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks — an institutional digital asset custody, transfer and settlement platform. “You have a huge concentration of people who understand finance. You have a huge amount of capital flowing in from traditional finance into crypto. All the big venture capitalists are based in New York and are pushing into crypto.”
Crypto culture
New York City has a long, well-established culture around cryptocurrency and blockchain. Way back on New Year’s Eve 2013/2014, Bitcoin Center NYC, a brick-and-mortar center dedicated to promoting and educating the public on the premier cryptocurrency, was launched by Nick Spanos — a real estate executive turned Bitcoin evangelist. The center quickly became a hub for fans of the still fairly underground cryptocurrency.
Spanos tells Magazine that “Bitcoin Center NYC brought Bitcoin from the back alleys to Wall Street, from something hidden to something celebrated, from something unknown to something open and transparent.”
Spanos later also founded the Blockchain Center, which is dedicated to education on the power of blockchain technology. He adds that while Bitcoin Center NYC has been relatively quiet during the COVID-19 pandemic, “we have a new space and are looking at bringing back the popular Satoshi Square gatherings — with an embrace of the growing crowd of Wall Street blockchain specialists and new believers.”
The Big Apple hosts a number of major blockchain and crypto conferences, including the annual New York Blockchain Week. Though it was ultimately canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, New York Blockchain Week 2020 was set to feature Consensus, the Digital Asset Summit, Ethereal Summit, The Block Summit, Magical Crypto Conference, ETH NYC and Smart Contract Summit #0. Some of the events went virtual, and the conference was again put on hold in 2021.
In-person conferences reappeared toward the end of 2021, including Blockworks Digital Asset Summit 2021, Mainnet 2021 and SALT, which were held in September, and CoinGeek Conference in early October, while NFT.NYC 2021 is scheduled for November.
Alex Mashinsky, a New Yorker who serves as CEO of crypto borrowing and lending platform Celsius Network — which is headquartered just across the river in New Jersey — tells Magazine that New York really is a crypto city: “You have money, you have people, you have tech, and you have a lot of customers who consume this technology. It’s a very cosmopolitan city, so you have people from every country and walk of life.” He adds, “We see a lot of wealth here. If rich people want to put 1% to 5% of their wealth into crypto, it’s going to happen here.”
https://twitter.com/Mashinsky/status/1450596000989687810
New York City has also been part of the burgeoning nonfungible token art scene. In March 2021, the artist collective Superchief opened what it alleged to be the first-ever brick-and-mortar NFT art gallery, and the Postmasters gallery in lower Manhattan has an NFT-focused division called PostmastersBLOCKCHAIN. Meanwhile, Beeple’s $69-million sale of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” in March took place via the NYC branch of auction house Christie’s.
However, some warn that NYC has been undergoing a “brain drain” that has seen top talent going elsewhere, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During the pandemic, other cities and states have been aggressively courting the crypto community with business, tax and regulatory incentives, and some have chosen to leave,” says Moro.
Mashinsky adds, “When you look at how fast Miami is moving, they created a coin for the city. They did all kinds of stuff, so we’re definitely behind. We’re almost reacting instead of enacting.”
Maybe that’s why crypto has been shaping up as an election issue. In June 2021, Eric Adams, the Democratic frontrunner for NYC’s next mayor, proclaimed that he would turn the city into “the center of Bitcoins.” Meanwhile, his Republican competitor, Curtis Sliwa, has pledged to make New York “the most cryptocurrency-friendly city in the nation.”
