What’s To Become of Miami’s “Crypto Hub” Status?

of the digital assets movement. Miami has witnessed an influx of crypto startups as entrepreneurs flocked to the city, attracted by its charismatic, crypto friendly mayor Francis Suarez and the promise of lower taxes. The signs are everywhere. There's crypto specific happy hours, major conferences, a retail space dedicated to Salona, and even a token just for the city and its residents,

Miami Coin. And then, of course there's fts. The now bankrupt Crypto Exchange had the naming rights to the basketball arena for the Miami Heat, and just about a month before its stunning collapse, the exchange had plans to move one of its top branches to the heart of the city's financial center, a move that was supported by the

mayor himself. In the aftermath of the FTX collapse and the overall negative sentiment and crypto markets, the city has paced tough questions about its part in the digital asset industry's future. My colleague Carlijuana was recently down in Miami and she joins us now to tell us about everything she saw and hurt. It's an appealing place to live.

The weather is awesome, the beach is right there, and as they get more infrastructure and they get more banks and financial institutions, it's really going to grow and has a pretty solid selling point for other bis. This is to come down there. Carlie welcomes to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. Well, maybe just to start, you can tell us about how Miami became a crypto hot bit of crypto hotspot. I would say a lot of that traces back to the guy that you mentioned already,

that is Mayor Francis Suarez. He's been mayor now for several years and he's pushed for a number of companies to move down to Miami. Right, So it's not just crypto, it's also hedge funds, vcs, tech companies, And he's really touted Miami as like almost in New York, and like you see it when you're there, some of the restaurants are even the same. The downtown even kind of fuels a little bit similar. Is that like New York buzz

I mean, I'm in Midtown right now. So he's pushed for a lot of these companies to move down there, and a lot of the push has been specifically through Crypto, and obviously that has stayed despite all that crypto has been through recently. Yeah, and obviously Crypto has been through a lot, which is why you went down to Miami

to check out everything that was going on. So maybe tell us about the general attitude of people when you were talking to them, Like did you go to some crypto bars maybe, and what were people telling you about how they're feeling about everything that's been going on? Right, So I went down there post FDx collapse in bankruptcy, and the basic question that we wanted to ask was this city that has made itself into a crypto capital,

has that change and will that change? And so when about that kind of centering the trip on these two conferences that I mean literally a ten minute walk away from one another. There was one called to Central and there was one called Web three and crypto conferences are their wild crazy like there was a sports car it was electric blue, parked outside of one of the conferences.

The other conference was a little bit more buttoned up, but still a lot of people, a lot of elders, people who had started their own companies, hopeful as about n f T projects and Web three designs. So that was the basics, right, so much a lot of fog machines. Fog machines. The weirdest booth was there was one where there was a man just for no reason at all, dressed up like Donald Trump, and I have no idea what that had to do with their booth except for

I think to like pull people right. So it was a crazy scene overall. Went to some after party events the week I was there, it was also Art Basil, so went to some specific Art Basil parties, which has I'm sure we'll get into it, but also its own kind of crypto bent to it. So it was the perfect way to ask the question of how is the crypto community feeling post FTX. The way I would answer that is honestly pretty good. Not the same though. It was different and I wasn't down there for this exact

same week last year. But people said, you know, the conferences were maybe half as many people as they were before. Art Basil market sentiment in general is very different than it was last year. But they said that the hype, the fervor, it wasn't quite there. That's not to say though,

that people aren't enthusiastic. A lot of people said that in some ways, the Bearer market to them just symbolizes that the crypto taurus are out and what's left is the real crypto believers, and those are the people that I guess I met with the most in Miami. It was the people who are sticking around and Bear or

ball markets. This is so interesting to me because I've been to so many crypto conferences in my lifetime, and so I know the feeling of the techno music starting at like seven am and the fog machines adding this crypto vibe to the whole conference. But that's so interesting to me that people are still very hopeful, so hopeful, so happy. I mean, it doesn't hold across the board.

People are obviously realistic. They're they're down about the fact that prices are down, but they're they're partying on I will say, and I think you had some very interesting conversations with some people down there, right. Yeah. So while I was in Miami, I spoke with a lot of startup founders. I started people with. I spoke with people who work and live in the space. One guy who I spoke with, his name is who some abood with

dot name. It's a blockchain naming service aggregator. It aligns a user's name in their actual money address and his wall address and all of his other naming services. It's essentially like the first n f t um. And he told me why he's not giving up on Miami. Mimi is doing great job. It's not just becoming it is actually it is a hub for for technology and not just script I would say, And because of all the

like reasons. It's an extremely fun place. And of the day, you want to be in a place where in all you wake up morning and it's the lovely weathers and then you go, you know, you go to for a run, or you go to swim a little bit, and you at night you want to be in a place where it's actually it's fun and there is no such place that where you you wake up every morning and you feel you still young and beautiful. Yeah, young and beautiful exactly. Who doesn't want to feel that way? And you do

in Miami. I mean it's I was down there in basically winter type weather. It should be Christmas season. There are Christmas trees and it was eighty degrees outside. Yeah, I love this. So is that what's so different about the Miami atmosphere that makes it so attractive for crypto entrepreneurs.

It's one of the things. And I will say too that this has been an accelerated interest of moving to different Southern cities as hubs for tech, not only just crypto, but that was really accelerated by the pandemic to when there's a work from anywhere push in Miami became one of the really big betefactors of that. In crypto as an industry that traditionally has been pretty flexible with remote working, it's kind of a question of, well, if you can

be anywhere, why not be to Miami. And it's especially true for Miami and the fact that there are so many conferences, they're so many events and so many networking opportunities, I mean endless things if you go on event right of happy hours coffee meet up. So one guy was telling me that there will just be like pool side hangout type things that are crypto networking activities and that

activity and adventure is still there. And one thing that was true from some and a lot of other people I talked with it's not their first bear market, so they've seen the cycles and they remain pretty confident that they will be able to weather the down cycle. Now and then, what about the role that Francis Suarez has played.

How has he how how big of a promoter has he been of crypto and how much was he behind some of the biggest changes that we've seen within Miami in terms of seeing these different FTX sponsorships for instance, or any other cryptocentric or crypto related development in the city. Right, So he's been huge. He's been very pro business, and he's been very pro crypto. I think Miami could easily

be one of the most globally significant cities. I think it can be what I call the capital of capital, a place where if you want to build a business, if you want to innovate. There is no better place in the planet because we're in the intersection of New York, of South America, UH Silicon Valley, and Israel in the Middle East, and so I think we're strategically located and positioned very well for the future. We have a tremendous ability to grow. We have we're inviting it. He remains

very procrypo. So I went to this one conference where he was a primary speaker. He launched off the conference and in his speech he did not mention f t X by name the entire time, but you knew what he was talking about. He interest kept referencing Yeah, I mean, he kept referencing the down cycles and how everything's changed. He didn't name any names, but he said they're going to continue on, They're going to keep building. Miami is

still a crypto capital. It's a crypto city, you know, and he's done that through various campaigns to bring people down there. He encouraged FTX to move down there. He encouraged other companies to set up their headquarters to He also had this Miami Coin initiative, which was basically a city coin established for Miami. So like Miami even had its own cryptocurrency at some point, and that was because

of Mayor's barez. So I don't think it's even possible to to overstate how important he was to all of these companies taking up Miami as their home coming. Up more with Bloomberg reporter Carli Wanna on how the future of crypto is shaping up in Miami. We'll be right back.

So you mentioned f t X that obviously was one of the biggest stories within crypto in two what sort of presence did they have in the city, right, So in one they announced that they would be setting up some sort of offices there, and so our understanding is that there was as a physical office in Miami for fd X. It's been there for a while now, but originally their fd X u S headquarters had been in Chicago.

Earlier this year, Within months of them opening up in Chicago, f t X u S announces just kidding, we're moving from Chicago and we are setting up camp in Miami. That happened just a couple of months a few months ago. Now, two months later, they obviously filed for bankruptcy, but even a month before fd X file, they were still, according

to reports, actively encouraging staffers to move down there. What we learned when we were there is that they were actually eyeing property at this really nice kind of luxury office building called four fifty Brickle of It's where a lot of other banks and investment types are set up. I mean space goes for ninety dollars a square foot, right, It's a very nice building. So they had all eyes

sat on this building. And then of course, you know, fd X files for bankruptcy and it's hard to know exactly what is going on with f t x U S and Bangmin. Freed has tweeted out recently enough, although before charges were brought up, because he hasn't been quite as active on Twitter since that has happened. He did tweet out that to his knowledge, f t x US

remained solvent. It's really fuzzy what exactly the details are. Regardless, f t x US was setting up its headquarters in Miami, and the footprint of f t X is elsewhere on that city. People told me that there was just places on the beach where you'd kind of see the f t x name or logo, or they'd have an advertising push. You know, they were at Formula one races last year, having parties. They even had this kind of clubby so

Lana Spaces type thing. And of course there was the f t X Arena that is home of the NBA Miami Heat and Miami did County is now asking a federal bankruptcy court for immediate right to terminate that agreement with them and get the ft X logo stripped off of it, despite the fact that I mean that was a thick deal. It was a d million dollars across nineteen years. Yeah, obviously having your name tied to the arena and everything and then having this fall out, it's

sort of mars the whole experience. But can you also talk about you you were with crypto people at crypto conferences where they were specifically gathering to talk about what's going on with crypto. But what about the general population within Miami how much crypto adoption actually is there because we did have this huge push as you mentioned by

the mayor. But is did crypto actually have a stronghold in in Miami or is it just that crypto fans would flock there to celebrate together, to party together, to be together when when they can be right when I talked to people in the area. They kind of used the term crypto tourists a lot. At first, I thought, right, right, so it was kind of I had to fill in the gaps. The first one person used it, and I thought, Wow, what a weird thing that they say. And then I

kept hearing this term. What my understanding came to be of this concept of cryptotauris was it was people who didn't necessarily live in Miami a couple of years ago and had just come there for the crypto hype. I mean, last November crypto prices where skyrocketing Bitcoin was over six k, and Miami saw it. They felt it. They felt this influx of people coming in wanting to be a part of this scene. Now what they're saying is that what's left is the people who are trying to build products.

They say that the conversation is more serious that it's Some people said exactly like quantity or quality over quantity. You know, the conversations are better even if there's fewer people who are part of it. And I talked to some folks to who where actually from Miami, and we've seen it through a lot of different cycles. One of them was Rock at Irvine. She runs an incubation coworking space in Windwood in an accelerator program partnerships with TATAM,

which is a Web three infrastructure for development company. I was so glad I met her. She was the perfect person to talk to and she had a lot of thoughts about f t X and about Crypto and how it had changed the city. She said that f t X was really present in promo and marketing campaigns. You saw that in the parties, you saw that in art Basil, you saw that in the hackathon. But at the end of the day, she said that Miami is so used to changing itself. Miami is so used to reinventing itself

as a city. So she said that even though ft X collapse, even if Crypto didn't have the stronghold anymore, at some point the city would be fine. It will find something else. It's just like Vegas spring breaks coming up. You know, they're they're going to be fine. It's transient, right, and it's a city that transform itself constantly. It like evolves,

you know. You know, in the early eighties, it used to be um a city where if you go to South Beach, there was a ton of old people on rocking chairs and like Europeans who were topless on the beach. And then over the years, you know, it turned into this like fun playground for young people, and then now it turned into this um innovation tech cub But in

the future it can become something else. Um. You know, it can transform into this you know, uh capital of capitals that people are trying to make Miami be um. You know, we have a lot of people coming from Tel Aviv, a lot of really really large unicorn factories that want to put their flag here and make Miami the next Silicon valley. Okay, so Miami is the next Silicon valley? Is that the sense that people gave you, Like, I'm just wondering what what what's next? Like what's next

from Miami? You mentioned all of the upsmism among the different crypto people, but like are they working on specific things and how maybe how does it tie into what's going on with Miami and its crypto push. Right. I think the story of Miami is probably very similar to the story of the crypto community in so many places, and that is the fact that people are still building,

they are still trying to roll out products. It's a harder space you know, I talked to a lot of bcs, are talked to people who are seeking funds, and it's certainly more challenging than it was in say, when markets were faring a lot better. I should also say that Miami under Suarez, they are still very much pushing for crypto companies to come down there. They haven't changed tax I think RAX that really put it best though, and

that Miami it's an appealing place to live. The weather is awesome, the beach is right there, and as they get more infrastructure and they get more banks and financial institutions, it's really going to grow and has a pretty solid selling point for other businesses to come down there. So yeah, like Roxette said, right now, it's crypto. Who knows what I might be moving forward. She had a guest that maybe it will be tech more generally setting up camp

in Miami as a hub. Whether that's true or not is yet to be seen, But I do see what she's saying. There is a certain energy and there is a certain appeal to Miami that I don't think it's going to go away. To all of our editors listening, Carlie and I are free to go to Miami whenever you guys need us too. Yeah, the office there was blooming here. Yeah, the Bloomberg office it was. They're set up the exact same same snacks. We're free to go, Yeah, anytime.

I can pack my bags right now. Yeah, I agree, I'm happy to go down. Well, Carlie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for having me. That was Bloomberg reporter carl Wanna. You can find more of her reporting on the Bloomberg Terminal and on Bloomberg dot com. For more, be sure to check out our twice weekly newsletter, Bloomberg Crypto. M This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio.

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