The final day of the Binance Blockchain Week, Dubai 2025, started with the morning keynotes and continued until the late afternoon, with the attendees awaiting the ‘debate of the year’ involving Peter Schiff and Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao.
Day 2 of the Binance Blockchain Week kicked off rather slowly this morning. The crowd walked in slowly, grabbing their refreshments and heading towards the counters with attractive freebies.
Attendees lined up in front of the claw machine to grab their Binance Bibi, a cute plush toy, yellow, chubby, and rhombus-shaped. Swapping stories, vox pops, and taking pictures, creators swarmed the Binance Creators lounge.
The major focus of discussions
Today was all about DeFi, on-chain data, AI, stablecoins, and financial connectivity, despite the market turbulence currently experienced in the crypto space.
Alice, the Head of Research at CoinMarketCap, acknowledged the increasing interest in the crypto space, despite it having reached its lowest point in over a year. She highlighted altcoins like APE and BitCash, which are gaining attention.
Nicolas Vaiman, the CEO of Bubblemaps, moderated the panel discussion with Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, and Benjamin Cowen, founder and CEO of Into The Cryptoverse, highlighting AI-driven analytics and real-time on-chain intelligence.
Cowen spoke about the breakdown of where the crypto market stands, and Nicholas used real-world use cases of the $Libra and $Shibu tokens. Their insights proved the role of AI in breaking down data and tracing back tokens on the blockchain.
The chairman of Bitmine, Tom Lee, said, “Ethereum in 2025 is having its ‘1971 moment.’ Tokenized products are on Ethereum, and it keeps upgrading,” as he described Ethereum as a guiding force for builders, liquidity, and long-term market structure.
The last and best hour of the day
By late afternoon, the crowd had already begun moving to secure their seats for the big debate between CZ and Schiff. What started as a petty challenge on X (formerly Twitter) had now taken center stage at the Binance Blockchain Week 2025.
Despite limited seating and space, attendees made every effort to squeeze in and witness the significant moment, while CZ posted a friendly selfie with his opponent on X.
When the moment came, it was better than expected, with Schiff calling Bitcoin’s driving force based solely on speculation. His opinion is that it only holds value as long as people continue to buy and sell it. Once people stop, its value is gone.
“Because it didn’t work as digital currency, so they called it digital gold,” said Schiff, while CZ made a point that 300 million people on Binance alone own some amount of Bitcoin.
The debate seemed to favor Schiff despite CZ making valid points, asking, “What about your son?” Schiff replied, “He has already sold his.”
As the event came to an end, nobody seemed to want to leave yet. The success of the event was more evident when people crowded outside the venue to network even after the doors closed, ending this season at BBW 2025.
