Just got back from CES 2026 in Las Vegas and I have to be honest with you all - if you blinked, you might have missed Web3 entirely.
The AI Tsunami
AI was everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Walk through any hall and you couldn’t escape it - AI TVs, AI PCs, AI smartphones, AI toilets (yes, really). Nvidia’s Jensen Huang dropped the Vera Rubin chip announcement - 10x improvement over Grace Blackwell - and AMD had OpenAI’s Greg Brockman on stage. The crowds were massive.
Robots were the second biggest story. Every major exhibitor had something walking, rolling, or crawling around. GENE.01 humanoid robot from Generative Bionics running on AMD chips got tons of attention.
So Where Was Blockchain?
CES Foundry was supposed to be our home - the new dedicated space at Fontainebleau Las Vegas for “AI, blockchain, and quantum innovation.” And to CTA’s credit, they did create this venue. John T. Kelley called it “where early-stage meets enterprise.”
But let’s be real: the blockchain presence was thin compared to AI. The demos I saw were mostly quantum computing focused (D-Wave, Quantum Computing Inc). There was a tokenization panel on movie ecosystems, which was interesting but felt niche.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
- 2.6M+ net square feet of exhibition space
- 4,100+ exhibitors
- 400+ conference sessions
How many were meaningfully about crypto or Web3? I counted maybe a dozen that weren’t buried in the CES Foundry sideshow.
What Does This Tell Us?
Is this a sign that Web3 has peaked in consumer consciousness? Or are we just at a different stage - enterprise adoption rather than consumer hype?
I’ll note that the hallway conversations were still happening. Met folks from Morgan Stanley’s crypto team (they’re launching a wallet this year), talked with some RWA tokenization startups. But the spectacle was all AI.
Curious what others think - is CES even the right venue for Web3 anymore? Should we care that AI grabbed all the headlines?
Honestly Chris? I’m not bothered by this at all. Hot take: CES was never our venue anyway.
Think about who CES is for - consumer electronics manufacturers, hardware companies, and the media that covers them. DeFi doesn’t need a booth at CES. We don’t need to compete with AI robots for attention.
Our conferences are ETHDenver, Token2049, DeFi conferences where the people attending actually understand what we’re building. The signal-to-noise ratio at those events is so much better than trying to explain liquidity pools to someone who came to see a folding phone.
Where DeFi is actually winning:
- TVL across protocols is steadily climbing toward $200B
- Real institutional players are building on-chain (Morgan Stanley news proves this)
- Stablecoin transaction volume continues to break records
- Infrastructure is more mature than it’s ever been
We’re past the “get normie attention at consumer tech shows” phase. That was 2021-2022. Now we’re in the “build infrastructure that institutions actually use” phase.
The AI hype will have its correction. Remember IoT? Self-driving cars? Blockchain itself? The hype cycle is predictable. Let them have CES - we’ll be here building actual financial infrastructure.
I’m going to push back a bit on Diana’s “who cares” take.
As someone who works with creators and artists every day, the narrative battle matters. CES is where mainstream tech journalists go. It’s where the “future of technology” story gets written for the next year.
When CES coverage is wall-to-wall AI with zero mention of digital ownership, NFTs, or creator economies - that shapes public perception. It affects funding, it affects talent recruitment, it affects whether my artists’ family members think they’re working on something legitimate or “that scam stuff.”
What I was hoping to see at CES 2026:
- Dynamic NFTs tied to consumer products (we’ve been building this!)
- Digital collectibles integrated into entertainment announcements
- Creator economy discussions in the content/media tracks
- Any acknowledgment that digital ownership matters
Instead we got AI this, AI that. Meanwhile NFT Paris just got cancelled. Major Web3 events are getting shelved. The market downturn is real and visibility matters during these times.
I agree that ETHDenver and Token2049 are our events. But we can’t only talk to ourselves forever. Consumer adoption requires reaching people where they are - and CES reaches a lot of them.
@crypto_chris - did you see any consumer-facing NFT or digital ownership discussions at all? Even small ones?