Written by: Will Canny
Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News
While major crypto industry summits compete to invite celebrity speakers and create increasingly lavish event venues, the FBI has been quietly holding its own annual conference.
Three past attendees interviewed by CoinDesk said that the FBI-hosted Virtual Asset Technical Exchange, formerly known as the Virtual Currency Symposium, brings together law enforcement personnel, staff from overseas investigative agencies, and crypto security professionals to exchange intelligence on crypto crime.
It is reported that several blockchain forensics firms, including Chainalysis and TRM Labs, attended this year's conference held in September in San Antonio, Texas. Nikhil Raghuveera, co-founder and CEO of Predicate, a blockchain financial compliance infrastructure service provider, gave a keynote speech on stablecoin compliance and the GENIUS Act.
People familiar with the matter said that the Security Alliance (SEAL), a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the crypto ecosystem from cyber threats, as well as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a unit under the U.S. Department of the Treasury responsible for combating money laundering and illicit finance, also sent representatives to attend.
The FBI and Chainalysis declined to comment, TRM Labs confirmed its attendance at the event, and Predicate also confirmed that its CEO spoke at the conference.
Two people familiar with the matter said that this invitation-only symposium has a cap of about 50 private vendors and partners in attendance, while the total number of conference participants can reach several hundred. The conference format includes keynote speeches, panel discussions, and fireside chats, while also providing networking sessions, and companies can also showcase their technology platforms in demonstration rooms.
Sources familiar with the conference's inner workings revealed that the topics discussed included criminal groups, terrorist financing's illicit use of virtual assets, online fraud, various scams, the dissemination of child sexual abuse material, human trafficking, and violent crime. Attendees also discussed recent hacking attacks, North Korea-related activities, and feasible options for intelligence sharing between the industry and law enforcement agencies.
Participants included senior FBI officials, frontline investigators, as well as representatives from other U.S. government agencies and overseas law enforcement partners.
One attendee said, "This is not a crypto industry conference; this is a law enforcement-specific conference for law enforcement agencies and their partners."
The atmosphere of this exchange is completely different from industry summits, with all discussions centered on illicit finance, national security, and investigative work aimed at arresting suspects and seizing assets. This attendee added that investigators exchange information at the conference about real-world threats currently unfolding, fund-tracing techniques, and successful cases that have already been solved.
A Conference with Extremely Low Visibility
Two anonymous people familiar with the matter said that this government-funded symposium has now reached its ninth year and has attracted hundreds of participants cumulatively.
The conference is not classified, but it has received almost no media attention. Most public information comes from content posted by attendees themselves rather than official FBI announcements, and there is none of the promotional hype common at commercial crypto conferences.
A LinkedIn post by Token Recovery executive Roman Bieda confirmed that the 2024 symposium was held in Austin.
Bieda, attending for the third time, said that the conference brings together public and private sector experts from various countries to discuss threats such as money laundering, ransomware, human trafficking, and crypto-related fraud. He did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
From an Internal Government Gathering to a Multi-Party Industry Forum
One interviewee said that in its early years, the conference was mainly attended by public officials from government agencies, and it has since continued to expand to include more crypto industry representatives.
The conference content is practical in nature, aiming to let attendees understand new attack methods, technically effective tools, and the patterns of attacks carried out by North Korean hacker groups against crypto companies.
The source added that there was also an in-depth presentation reviewing the $270 million hack of Drift. In April 2026, hackers gained administrative privileges and used manipulated tokens as collateral to steal more than $270 million in assets from this Solana ecosystem decentralized exchange.
Sharing Threat Intelligence in the Crypto Field
One attendee said that unlike the glossy venues and marketing atmosphere of large crypto summits, this FBI symposium deliberately keeps a low profile. But the growing participation of industry institutions also reflects how much law enforcement currently relies on crypto companies, blockchain analytics firms, and security researchers to locate attackers and trace stolen funds.
"This event does not pursue grandeur; its core purpose is to figure out who is doing what, what best practices exist, and what new threats will emerge in the future."
Data from a Chainalysis report shows that crypto activity related to sanctioned countries surged in 2025, with Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly using digital assets to support government-led financial and security operations; the scale of crypto assets received by sanctioned entities soared 694% year over year.
The FBI established the Virtual Assets Unit in February 2022 as the hub for the bureau's cryptocurrency-related work, bringing together professionals from criminal and cyber divisions to support case investigations, intelligence analysis, and illicit fund tracing. An official press release at the time said the unit was established against the backdrop of digital assets being widely used in crimes such as ransomware, child sexual exploitation, murder-for-hire, and terrorist financing.
But people familiar with the matter said that the FBI had already been handling virtual asset cases well before 2022, and that a dedicated team focused on this area had been operating for about ten years.
One attendee commented, "The value of this conference is that you can see how law enforcement agencies respond to various types of illicit activity, and they attach great importance to this."
