Coinbase did layoffs again — which London crypto events are still worth going to
After publicly reported Coinbase layoffs, the London crypto scene has thinned. A short, honest take on which events are still worth your evening.
Coinbase has done another round of publicly reported layoffs. I am not going to put a number on it because the number depends which press release you read and they keep getting revised, but the company has confirmed cuts. The follow-on conversation — including in the London crypto scene — is whether the local meetup ecosystem is dying with it.
Short answer: no, but it has thinned. Long answer below.
For the rolling list, startup events in London covers crypto and non-crypto stuff together — useful when you want to see the broader picture and not just the bear-market doom of one sub-niche.
What's actually happened
The London crypto event scene was bloated in 2021 and 2022. Lots of sponsored mixers, lots of "Web3 networking" things at coworking spaces with two free drinks and a pitch about the metaverse. A lot of those have either folded or been quietly absorbed into bigger umbrella events.
What remains tends to be a bit more serious: builder-focused, infra-focused, or genuinely social rather than pretending to be a venture pitch.
Still worth it
Ethereum London meetups. Long-running, technical, free, and survives every market cycle. The audience now is heavier on actual protocol engineers and lighter on token tourists. Better for it.
Encode Club London hackathons. Encode runs a lot of crypto-flavoured hackathons in London. Even after the layoffs the prize pools have stayed reasonable because a lot of the sponsors are infra companies, not exchanges.
ZK and cryptography reading groups. Smaller, nerdier, free. If you actually care about the maths and are not chasing a token allocation, these are the rooms.
Not worth it
Generic "Web3 Founders Mixer" events. The 2022 vintage of these has not aged. Half the attendees lost jobs in the layoffs and the other half are pivoting to AI. The conversations are bleak.
Anything with "metaverse" in the title. Honestly, what year do you think it is.
Hotel-bar pitch nights with a £40 ticket. Same energy as the AI version of the same scam. Skip.
The Coinbase-specific bit
Coinbase has had a UK presence for years and the London crypto community has a lot of current and former employees in it. Some of them are good people I have shared a beer with at meetups. None of that is fabricated insider info — they were on the speaker lists, they have public LinkedIn profiles, you can verify it yourself.
After the layoffs, the realistic move for someone who got cut is the same as in any tech layoff: show up, talk to people, do not be precious about what you build next. The London crypto scene is small enough that being useful and visible for six months will get you somewhere new. I have watched it happen at least three times in the last year.
If you are recruiting and want to hire ex-Coinbase people, the meetups are honestly more efficient than LinkedIn — half the attendees are quietly looking, no one wants to advertise it.
What's changed structurally
A few things have shifted in 2025-2026 that matter:
- Crypto and AI events are increasingly the same event. The "AI x Web3" framing was annoying in 2023 but the line really has blurred for parts of infra.
- The big-spend sponsored evenings are mostly gone. Replaced by smaller, builder-led things.
- Hackathons are the most vibrant part of the scene. The London hackathon page shows a steady drumbeat.
- The conferences that survived (Ethereum London, EthCC adjacent meetups during conference season) are more technical now.
The honest summary
The London crypto scene is smaller, more technical, and less embarrassing than it was at the peak. That is fine. If you only ever liked it for the free drinks and the airdrop hopium, this is bad news. If you actually liked the engineering, this is the best the scene has been in years.
Either way: stop going to the £40 networking events and start going to the £0 builder ones. That advice has been right since 2020 and remains right now.
Anyway, that is my read. Comments are open if you think I am wrong, which several of you definately will.
9 comments
- Mason J.·
Ethereum London meetups are still genuinely good. The protocol talks last month were excellent.
- Hira S.·
Got cut in the round before this one. Going to a hackathon next week, this post is fair.
- Owen P.·
The metaverse jab is well deserved. Painful to remember.
- Naina V.·
ZK reading groups are the best thing in London crypto right now, no contest.
- Jed R.·
Disagree on the £40 events being all bad — one specific one in Mayfair is actually decent. Most are nonsense though.
- Lila T.·
AI x Web3 framing in 2023 was so annoying. The blur is real now though.
- Sofie M.·
Found this via rifio. The startup-events page filtered to crypto is genuinely useful.
- Devesh N.·
Encode hackathons are great. Won a small bounty at the last one, the prize money does still flow.
- Aisha B.·
Sober, fair, slightly grim, all correct.
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