photo: Ahmed A. Mansour

I spent an entire day at Dubai’s Crypto Expo without being offered even one free T-shirt.

The previous iteration of the expo happened in March. Exhibitors competed to win over possible investors and were very generous with their giveaways. They handed out branded stress balls, teddy bears, memory sticks, playing cards, raffle tickets and networking invitations all wrapped in premium quality goodie bags.

This time, they handed out bags—just bags, with the same quality as the $0.99 tote grocery sacks at supermarket checkouts.

"The bear market is taking a toll on everybody,” said Amarnath Ramachandran, a full-time crypto investor and trader. He’s lost money in some of his company investments from the previous expo but understands that cycles are the nature of the market.

“Last year, there were more quality companies than this time,” he said.

The number of exhibitors, in general, seemed fewer than last time. The booths were larger and more spaced away from each other, unlike the previous expo. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The previous expo was full of non-fungible token projects making outrageous promises about building the next metaverse, taking their holders to the moon and outperforming the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

And there were parties on actual yachts.

This time, the party was over. Most of the “shitcoins” and the thousands of semi-identical, semi-plagiarized NFT profile pictures have disappeared into oblivion.

One exhibitor stood its ground, occupying the same spot as the last expo- Saitama. The web3 decentralized finance company had a huge presence last time, capitalizing on its popularity. It had a dedicated Twitter Swarm that marketed its products to anyone who mentioned the expo on social media.

“The bear market is taking a toll on everybody”

— Amarnath Ramachandran

It announced an ambitious roadmap that included play-to-earn games in a dedicated metaverse. It promised an NFT market. In a tongue-in-cheek stunt, it printed a “Saitama Dollar” for the “United Wolf Pack of the World,” with the motto “In Defi We Trust One.”

Its Token, Saitama Inu, was once in the top 40 cryptocurrencies on CoinMarketCap. Today it is not even in the top 300, and its price has fallen more than 90 percent from its all-time high. Saitama did not fulfill many of these promises and angry critics on Reddit and YouTube have called the project a scam.

source: CoinMarketCap

“We are not hiding. We are not scamming anyone. This is utter bullshit,” said Gabriel Klein, Saitama’s Chief Creative Officer.

“Some people are not informed enough about crypto and think that when a token loses value, the developers have taken the money. This is not the case,” he said. 

Klein expressed his frustration with fear, uncertainty and doubt, or FUD, saying that he urges the community not to respond to accusations. “The best answer is to keep building and deliver,” he said. He pointed to himself, saying that the founders and partners of the project attend events all around the world and are not giving up on the project nor disengaging from the community.

Klein explained that Saitama is self-funded, and the bear market forced the company to reprioritize its projects and put some of them on hold. Saitama is now focused on its core technology, launching a decentralized app that aims to be the “Swiss knife of decentralized finance” to enable users to swap tokens of curated and vetted projects, he said.

Saitama is currently forming a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, for a project called “Saita City,” which invests in real-life real estate. The goal is to enable investors to buy shares in tokenized properties or participate in decision-making through the DAO’s governance.

“We are building in the bear market and preparing to launch in the bull market,” he said. 

photo: Ahmed A. Mansour

The bear market did not affect everyone equally. Those who work in the crypto real estate niche were thriving.

“Our business was not affected by the bear market. We are getting an influx of new customers,” said Mazen Elshimy, co-founder of Bitestate. The company offers crypto investors a one-stop-shop to buy property in the UAE, and according to Elshimy, the business has been great since they started a year and a half ago.

Elshimy said they have two kinds of clients. The first are the seasoned crypto investors and traders who may have profited from the bear market as they managed to time it right and short it, cashing out when others were losing.

The second are those who are not using crypto as a means to invest but as means of moving money. “We have seen a wave of Russian and Ukrainians buying properties here after the war broke out, and we are seeing another wave now after the mobilization,” he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision in September to draft hundreds of thousands of youth for military service.

The decision led to an exodus of Russians who did not want to participate in the war. A one-way ticket from Moscow to Dubai soared to $5,000. Even before that, at least 4,000 millionaires are estimated to have left Russia for the UAE.

Some are Bitestate clients. They bought properties in crypto for as low as 300,000 dirhams ($82,000) and up to 5 million dirhams ($1.3 M).

“We advise our clients to invest in several medium-sized properties to guarantee a good ROI,” Elshimy said, explaining that his most recommended option is investing in a one million dirhams one-bedroom apartment and offering it for a short lease.

“The Russian ruble, gold, and the British pound have all fallen in value,” Elshimy said. “People consider Dubai - the city itself - as a haven for protecting their savings,” and the trend is not dying soon.

The general atmosphere and sentiment of the expo were quite depressing. Still, the few founders confident in their ability to sustain the crypto winter were striving for greener pastures.

I left the expo more informed and less entertained than the last one - a fair trade.