The Crypto Economicon was a small, invite-only technical conference held in San Francisco in late January 2015. It was organized by Kieren James-Lubin and others who knew that many people from the Ethereum and broader blockchain community would be in the Bay Area that week.

Origins

As Kieren James-Lubin described in his interview:

"We decided to run kind of a parallel technical conference that week, which we named the verbose Crypto Economicon."

The name was inspired by the emerging field of "crypto economics," a term either invented or popularized by Vitalik Buterin and explored extensively by Vlad Zamfir in his work on proof of stake.

Format

The conference had approximately 60 attendees and featured two academic track days and a business track day. It was co-hosted with a company called Coinify, run by Tom Ding, in a building in San Francisco.

Significance

Despite its small size, the conference brought together many people who would go on to become major figures in the blockchain space:

"That conference was like 60 people… almost everyone who went either is already a well-known figure, if they weren't then, or went on to do something really, really interesting." — Kieren James-Lubin

It was at this conference that Kieren James-Lubin met Victor Wong in person for the first time. The two, along with Jim Hormuzdiar, would go on to co-found BlockApps.