Bitcoin 2025 Turns Las Vegas Into a Global Bitcoin Policy and Industry Forum

From May 27 through May 29, 2025, Bitcoin 2025 filled the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas with developers, miners, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, media, and Bitcoin communities from around the world. Organizers later reported roughly 30,000 attendees, thousands of companies, and hundreds of speakers, making it one of the largest gatherings in Bitcoin’s history.

The conference became a platform for developments that reached well beyond the event itself. Pakistan used the gathering to announce a government-led Strategic Bitcoin Reserve plan, corporate treasury companies used the week to promote increasingly ambitious Bitcoin strategies, and Vice President JD Vance delivered remarks that placed Bitcoin policy directly inside the public agenda of a sitting U.S. administration.

One of the conference’s most memorable human moments came on May 29, when Ross Ulbricht addressed the Bitcoin community after more than a decade in federal custody. Pardoned and released earlier in the year, Ulbricht thanked supporters who had written to him, raised money, and advocated for his freedom. He spoke about freedom, decentralization, and unity before a large main-stage audience, turning his return into a symbolic reunion between one of Bitcoin’s most controversial early figures and a community that had kept his case alive for years.

That concentration of sovereign policy, national politics, corporate finance, open-source discussion, and Bitcoin culture made the Las Vegas edition historically distinctive. The conference captured a moment when Bitcoin was simultaneously a protocol under active debate, a balance-sheet asset, a political issue, a sovereign-policy subject, and a community with a long memory of its own early history.