Inside David Haslop's Crypto Empire

In February 2022, Gold Coast trader David Haslop told finance publication Stockhead he had booked the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre for September and intended to fill it with 5,000 people and 60 vendors for a new event called the Australian Crypto Convention.¹ At the time, trust in the industry was brittle and mainstream scepticism was high. Haslop's argument was simple: put the sector in one room, give it a stage, and make crypto look less like an online subculture and more like an investable industry.

Haslop's platform then was The Crypto Den, a trading-education community he said had grown to more than 55,000 members.¹ The convention was the logical next step: a digital audience converted into a physical marketplace. By his own account, it was also a leap into unfamiliar territory. He had not previously run an exhibition of that size.

The first Australian Crypto Convention opened on 17 September 2022 at Broadbeach. The programme mixed industry evangelists, exchange founders, lawyers, technologists and spectacle: MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor was billed as the headline name, Binance Australia's then chief executive Leigh Travers appeared alongside Swyftx co-founder Alex Harper, and one exhibitor promoted a competition for a trip to space.² Haslop later put attendance at almost 4,000. The figure has not been independently audited in the material reviewed for this article.

Four editions

The second edition moved to Melbourne. On 11 and 12 November 2023, the convention took over halls at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Organisers claimed more than 200 sponsors, 250 speakers and eight stages.³ The speaker list included Finder founder Fred Schebesta, executives from PayPal, ANZ and EY, and a cohort of exchange founders, lawyers and crypto educators. As with the first year, the publicly available record relies heavily on organiser material.

The third edition was held at ICC Sydney on 23 and 24 November 2024, according to event listings and sponsor recap material. The fourth returned to ICC Sydney on 22 and 23 November 2025; ticketing pages described it as the event's fourth edition, with organiser claims of more than 10,000 attendees, 1,000 companies, 120 sponsors and exhibitors, and more than 150 speakers.⁴ Those numbers remain the organisers' claims. No independent attendance audit was identified in the public material reviewed.

The model is familiar: exhibitor stands, sponsorship packages, ticket sales and a speaker programme that also functions as marketing. The timing was less ordinary. The convention launched as the crypto market was sliding from boom to crisis, and it grew during the sector's recovery. In that sense, the Australian Crypto Convention became a useful barometer of the industry's resilience: even after exchange failures, regulatory pressure and retail losses, there were still enough companies prepared to buy space and enough investors prepared to attend.

Across the Tasman

By 2026 the business was presenting itself as Web3 Australia Group, with Haslop as founder and chief executive. Its next move was New Zealand. NZ Crypto Con opened at the New Zealand International Convention Centre in Auckland on 6 and 7 June 2026, marketed as the country's largest crypto and web3 event, with Swyftx as naming-rights partner and Binance attached to the keynote theatre.⁵

The Auckland launch was not simply an Australian event exported across the Tasman. Cryptocurrency NZ, a local community body, had been developing its own large-scale event under the working title Decentralize NZ. After what it described as an initial period of caution, it entered a formal partnership with the Australian organisers.⁵ Haslop told the organisation the group had committed substantial resources to production, compliance, marketing and content, and that the aim was to narrow the gap between global development in the technology and local understanding.

The money expo

The broadest play is MyMoney Expo, a finance and investing event scheduled for ICC Sydney on 28 and 29 November 2026 and co-located with AusCryptoCon. ICC Sydney describes the event as covering investing, property, superannuation, shares, cryptocurrency, trading, business, financial planning, fintech and wealth creation. Web3 Australia Group's own material pitches it as an education-first event for traditional finance, markets and long-term wealth building.⁶

The strategic logic is clear. A crypto-only show is constrained by the size and reputation of the crypto audience. A broader investor expo can sell a different promise: access to everyday investors, advisers, property groups, fintech providers, wealth educators and traditional finance brands. It also allows crypto exhibitors to sit inside a larger money-and-investing conversation, rather than outside it.

The man

Haslop is based on the Gold Coast. Public professional profiles and industry body material identify him as founder and chief executive of Web3 Australia Group and as a former non-executive director of Digital Economy Council of Australia, formerly Blockchain Australia. He has also been associated with Dcomm Blockchain.⁷ His public language is consistent: the events are about education, connection and building confidence in the digital-asset economy.

That is also the language of a promoter selling floor space, sponsorship and legitimacy. The available record shows a business that has delivered multiple events, attracted major crypto brands and expanded into adjacent markets. It also shows a record built largely from organiser statements, sponsor material, ticketing pages and industry listings. The stronger story is not that Haslop built a conference. It is that he built a conference business in a volatile sector where confidence itself is the product.