A crypto comedy night and the wristband black market at Token2049

“Why didn’t Superman come to this event?” asked the guy on the stage. “Because it was a crypto night!”

Cue groans. That joke should give you an idea of the level of humour at a web3 comedy night Tuesday evening at Singapore’s The Lemon Stand comedy club.

A reference to Bitcoin here, a mention of an Inu coin going to the moon there.

The comedy night punctuated a wave of events, panels, networking sessions and more at Token2049 in Singapore, an annual gathering that touts a bringing together “of the leading voices in crypto” including Tyler Winklevoss, co-founder and CEO of Gemini, and Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX.

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No such voices seemed to be at the comedy club, though.

There were more lame jokes. Some Singaporean politics. A lot of complaining about wives.

Odd, because it’s not like there isn’t low hanging fruit. FTX? Terra? 3AC? Perhaps it’s a reminder that to the average person these names mean little. We live in a bubble. So I asked ChatGPT for some bangers:

Why did Justin Sun refuse to play cards with other cryptocurrency founders? Because he was afraid they would “decentralise” his deck!

Why did CZ get kicked out of the movie theatre? Because he kept trying to “list” all the characters on Binance!

Why did the FTX user bring a ladder to the trading floor? Because he heard they had high “leverage”!

Why did the developer quit his job at Terraform Labs? Because he couldn’t find the “stable” environment he was promised — just stablecoins!

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Somehow the quote and exclamation marks make the jokes worse.

In any case, for The Lemon Stand it was a tough audience. Most in crypto don’t have a lot to laugh about these days.

Elsewhere in Singapore, Token2049 fever was mounting.

On the flight to Singapore the row in front of me was clearly also headed to Token. Their t-shirts said metaverse-something-or-other.

The entire flight they had laptops out and lolled around the emergency exit, switching between the chairs and the floor as they hashed out the finer details of their pitch.

Yet following the comedy night, the feeling that the daily crypto quota had not been achieved led me to attempt to gatecrash an Asia Blockchain Gaming Alliance party at the Marina Bay Sands’ plush CÉ LA VI bar.

I had envisioned it as quite easy to do; the Token2049 app lists attendees and I planned on simply borrowing a name and claiming I had a dead phone in lieu of confirming ID via a QR code.

Clearly, many had the same idea. The entrance was chaos. Gatecrashers had crowded the entrance clamouring to somehow get in. A woman assured me this was quite normal. Last year, according to her, was even worse.

It was certainly different to the sister event in London. Token2049 in London last year had been held in the rather dour environs of Canary Wharf. Nobody seemed to want to be there.

In Singapore, even those that weren’t invited were showing up.

An entire black market for the coveted orange wristbands that permitted entry to the ABGA party had sprung up around the taxi pick up point. An early leaver need only step a foot outside the door and be accosted by the hopeful for his treasure.

In return for a wristband, one could receive a couple of sentences of polite conversation as the fabric was slowly but desperately worked from one’s wrist over the hand, perhaps with a perfunctory scanning of Telegram QR codes.

Me and two Taiwanese VCs cornered an exiting trio and I obtained a coveted orange wristband from a rather handsome Singaporean man. I had made it into one of the evening’s most exclusive parties and spent the night speed networking.

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Give crypto its credit; people know how it is. Where are you from? What do you do? What’s your Telegram? Scan, move on. Repeat for three hours. Pass out from exhaustion.

Returning home, workers were setting up for the Formula One due to take place in Singapore later this week. Roads were blocked, things swung overhead from cranes.

Somehow I ended the night with not one but three wristbands. Don’t ask me how. I had to marvel at the ease of which people removed them for strangers. As I sat watching the live-action version of One Piece on Netflix, I tried to get the last one off.

It took an uncooperative pair of nail clippers and a good 10 minutes to get rid of the damn thing.