Two major crypto events canceled after city hit by 18 violent physical attacks on crypto holders amid market downturn

NFT Paris was supposed to be the kind of week people plan their year around.

You book the ticket, you text the group chat, you lock in the flights before prices jump, you tell yourself the hotel bill is “work”, you start quietly hoping the market gives you a reason to feel optimistic again.

Then, with about a month to go, the organisers pulled the plug.

On the official site, NFT Paris and RWA Paris 2026 are now marked as cancelled. The statement is blunt, almost tired. “The market collapse hit us hard,” the team wrote, adding that after “drastic cost cuts” and months of trying, they couldn’t make it work this year.

They say all tickets will be refunded within 15 days. They also apologise to people who already booked flights and hotels, and they end with a message to their own staff, a public thank you, and a quiet attempt to help them land on their feet.

If you’ve been around crypto long enough, you’ve seen cancellations before. Events live and die on hype cycles. When the money is flowing, everyone wants a stage. When the money dries up, a conference is one of the first line items to get chopped.

Still, this one lands differently, because it sits on top of another reality that is getting harder to ignore in France, the rise in crypto-linked kidnappings, home invasions, and extortion attempts.

NFT Paris says it’s a market story. A lot of people in the community, especially those who have been reading the police blotter with fresh eyes, think it’s also a safety story, or at least safety is part of the background radiation now, the kind of thing that quietly changes behaviour, budgets, and what “going to an event” actually feels like.

You can hold both ideas in your head at the same time.

The official reason is money, and the numbers have been ugly

NFT Paris doesn’t dress this up. It calls it a market collapse, it says the cuts weren’t enough, and it ends the chapter.

The broader NFT market context also points in the same direction. NFT trading never really returned to the cultural dominance of 2021, and the last stretch of 2025 was particularly soft. Data showing a slump in monthly sales, including a weak November figure in late 2025, which matters because events depend on sponsor confidence and a sense that people will show up ready to spend, not just ready to network.

You can feel this in the way crypto marketing has changed. The loud era of “buy a booth, throw a party, hire a DJ, print 10,000 hoodies” has been replaced by a colder question, what is the return, who are we actually reaching, and can we justify this to a finance team that no longer believes in vibes.

In that environment, a big public event becomes a fragile machine. If ticket sales come in late, if a few sponsors hesitate, if venue costs are locked in, the margin for error disappears.

Then there is the part nobody likes talking about, because it is grim

Across France, over the past year, there has been a string of cases that share a pattern, someone is perceived to have crypto, or to be connected to someone with crypto, and the crime is physical.

It’s not one incident but a sequence that stretches from the edges of the country back into Paris, and out again.

On Dec 31, 2024, a home invasion in Saint-Genis-Pouilly targeted the parents of an influencer, the father was abducted and later found, reported by France24.

On Jan 21, 2025, Ledger co-founder David Balland and his partner were kidnapped near Vierzon, with a ransom demand in crypto, Reuters reported on the case, and it drew wider coverage in outlets like the FT.

A few days later, Jan 24, 2025, a crypto professional was kidnapped and held near Troyes, with arrests reported by LeParisien.

By May, the cases had moved into the city.

On May 1, 2025, the father of a wealthy crypto entrepreneur was abducted in Paris, and later rescued during a police raid, reported by France24.

On May 13, 2025, there was an attempted kidnapping in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, targeting the pregnant daughter of Paymium CEO Pierre Noizat, foiled in the street, covered by LeMonde.

There are more, including disrupted plots and assaults tied to crypto holdings, in Normandy, near Nantes, in Essonne, and beyond, reported by outlets like RFI, Europe1, and French regional press.

By late 2025 and early 2026, the drumbeat kept going, including cases in Val-d’Oise and Charente-Maritime, with reporting from LeDauphiné.

This matters because conferences are made of humans. Humans who wear lanyards with their names on them. Humans who post photos of where they are. Humans who meet strangers for “a quick coffee,” then walk back to hotels with expensive laptops, sometimes with big public personas attached to their wallets.

Even if you never experience a crime personally, the atmosphere changes when enough people start swapping stories, and when “keep a low profile” becomes standard advice.

There’s also the psychological shift. In the early NFT boom, the danger was financial, you might get rugged, you might overpay for a JPEG, you might wake up to a floor price collapse. Over the past year, the fear has started to look more physical, and that kind of fear travels fast through a community.

So was NFT Paris cancelled because of safety, or because of the market?

The honest answer is that the organisers said market, and that is the only on-the-record reason we have from them.

But that doesn’t mean safety is irrelevant. It can be a silent cost. It can be a constraint that makes everything harder.

Security is expensive. Insurance is expensive. High profile speakers become harder to lock in when they are thinking about their families, not their flight connections. Sponsors have to weigh brand exposure against risk. Attendees have to decide whether they want to be visible at all, especially the kind of visibility that comes with VIP lounges, afterparties, and public appearances.

A market downturn already reduces the money available for events. A safety overhang can shrink the pool of people willing to participate publicly. Those two pressures can meet in the middle, and that is where an event breaks.

You can see the tension in one simple detail from the NFT Paris statement. The team specifically apologises to people who had already booked flights and hotels, it’s a very human line, it implies they know how many people had committed real money to being there. See the apology.

If you’re one of those people, your frustration isn’t theoretical. It’s a non-refundable booking. It’s time off work. It’s childcare. It’s the emotional cost of planning around something that disappears.

Paris is still hosting crypto events, which adds another layer

As of press time, Paris Blockchain Week is still selling tickets for April 15 to 16, 2026, on its official tickets page.

That matters because it suggests Paris is not closed for business. The city remains a magnet for institutional finance, regulators, and the broader “tokenization” narrative, even while an NFT-focused flagship event couldn’t make it to the starting line.

That split is telling.

NFTs are the retail facing corner of crypto culture. They live on sentiment and attention. When the market is quiet, the marketing budgets get cut first, and the community energy gets harder to manufacture.

Tokenization, RWAs, the institutional track, those stories have a different funding base, and a different audience. Even the forecasts are framed in years, not in weeks. McKinsey, for example, estimates tokenized financial assets could reach around $2 trillion by 2030, with a range of $1 trillion to $4 trillion, in a report on tokenization.

Whether those numbers land or not, the point is that institutions plan in long arcs, and conferences that cater to them can survive a cycle that wipes out the more culture-driven events.

NFT Paris tried to bridge those worlds by pairing with RWA Paris. The fact that both are cancelled in the same announcement feels like a signal that simply adding “RWA” to the masthead isn’t enough to fix the underlying event economics, especially when the community itself is splitting into different tribes, builders, traders, artists, compliance, and capital.

Community is learning what risk really means

There’s a moment in every crypto cycle where the story stops being about charts and starts being about people.

You can hear it in the NFT Paris statement, the line about their team, the way they say the staff “deserved a better outcome,” the way they offer to connect them with jobs.

You can hear it in the kidnapping reporting, because those stories are not about wallets, they’re about parents, partners, children, and the simple terror of being targeted in your own home, or in the street outside it.

That’s why the safety question keeps coming up, even when the official reason is market collapse. It’s because a conference is one of the most public things a community does. It’s the opposite of operational security. It’s a celebration of being seen.

When the mood shifts from “be seen” to “be careful,” the whole culture changes.

NFT Paris built something real, tens of thousands of attendees over four editions, a place where internet-native industries could meet in person, and turn usernames into handshakes. Now that chapter ends, and the industry has to sit with what it says about the moment we are in.

A soft market can kill an event quickly.

A fearful market can change what it means to show up at all.

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