BroadChain, April 28 - At this year's Hong Kong Blockchain Week in April, the most memorable moment was not any roundtable discussion, but a late-night scene at a cha chaan teng. Around 10 PM, in a cha chaan teng in Wan Chai, four or five people crowded around a table eating dry-fried beef ho fun and discussing their next steps. A friend who previously worked on stablecoin payments told me his team had fully pivoted to AI; another who had built on-chain data tools said he now spends half his time helping AI companies set up data pipelines. No one talked about token prices, no one discussed narratives, and the word "Web3" barely came up.
This scene is not surprising—three years ago, the same group sat at the same table, passionately debating DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain gaming. Now, they are still equally enthusiastic, but the topics have completely changed. After attending the Hong Kong Carnival and Bangkok's Money 20/20, one thought kept recurring: the most crypto-native people are becoming the least crypto-focused.
This year's Hong Kong Carnival noticeably lacked crypto-native project teams, and the frenzy of free T-shirts and narrative hype has faded. The official theme, "Mountain, Wind, Cloud, Sea," clearly signals a departure from speculative trading narratives. In the exhibition area, familiar faces like OKX Wallet, TRON, ZA Bank, HashKey, and Sinohope were still present, but the focus of conversation was almost exclusively on RWA and AI. RWA continues the momentum from last year, but insiders know who is genuinely building and who is just performing. For Hong Kong, RWA is essentially financial productization—tokenizing real-world assets for more efficient cross-border distribution, which is precisely what Hong Kong excels at in institutional design and financial engineering. AI is more nuanced: almost every roundtable discussed the combination of AI and Web3, but most discussions remained at the level of "these two should be combined," with no one able to clearly explain how to combine them or what problems to solve. My impression is that Web3 is riding on AI's coattails, not because it has a clear vision, but because without AI, there is no narrative to sell.
Flying from Hong Kong to Bangkok, the atmosphere was completely different. Money 20/20 is a pure fintech B2B exhibition, with attendees dressed formally and business matchmaking areas packed from morning to night. Stablecoin and crypto-native companies accounted for about one-third of the exhibitors: OSL, Circle, Ripple, Fireblocks, Cobo, Pyth, and a dozen others, many of which were exhibiting for the first time. Money 20/20 also launched a new zone this year called "Intersection," specifically designed for the convergence of traditional finance and DeFi. These crypto-native exhibitors weren't selling cryptocurrencies at their booths; they were selling payment rails.