Au revoir NFT PARiS

NFT Paris 2026 got cancelled… Now what?

There is a particular hush that follows a cancellation.

Not the chaos of collapse, but the softer sound of a room emptying itself of expectation. NFT Paris will not happen this year. And in that absence, something more interesting begins to surface.

For many, conferences have long functioned less as destinations than as excuses. An excuse to gather. An excuse to travel. An excuse to finally meet the people we have only known through avatars, handles, and fragments of thought. The schedule was rarely the point. The corridors were.

So maybe this is not a loss… It’s more of a redistribution. People will still come to Paris. They will still arrive with conversations half-finished, with friendships waiting to be embodied, with ideas that need air. I know that last year, I barely set foot in the conference: I only went there to surprise my dear friends at Art Blocks with some pastries.

The city itself has always been the real venue.

Cafés will host better panels than auditoriums.

Long dinners will do more for culture than keynote slides ever could.

we held space at a little bar in Le Marais.

If you were going, go nonetheless! Not because there is a badge to collect, but because there are people to encounter, connections to be made in real, organic, sincere ways.

Go for the dinners, the detours, the miscommunications, the accidental meetings that become permanent. Go for the version of the digital, web3 art world that only exists when it is not being officially staged.

And yet, this moment also invites a quieter critique.

The conference model has grown heavy. Excessive. Overproduced. We have mistaken scale for significance, programming for meaning, and spectacle for substance.

Too often, the format demands noise where reflection is needed. Too often, it rewards visibility over depth.

Digital art, in particular, does not thrive in crowded halls with fluorescent lighting and overstimulated attention. It thrives in intimacy. In slowness. In conversation. In the kind of spaces where you are allowed to look twice, and then a third time.

The cancellation is not a failure of community, but a reminder of its resilience. Culture does not require scaffolding to exist. It only requires people willing to show up for one another without being told where to sit.

This is an opportunity to return to smaller rooms. To small dinners. To gatherings that feel less like brand events and more like encounters.

Paris will still be there. So will we... Well, at least I will.

And maybe, just maybe, we will remember that the most important parts of culture have always happened just slightly off the official map.