Columbus, Ohio will host the inaugural Midwest Bitcoin Summit on September 23-24, and if CEO and co-founder Andrew Tillman has his way, it won’t look like every other Bitcoin conference you’ve been to.
According to Tillman, the region has absorbed more economic damage from the dollar’s fiat status than anywhere else in the country. Ohio and its neighbors were manufacturing powerhouses in the decades after World War II—stable jobs, strong wages, the kind of place you could raise a family on one income.
Then came 1971, the gold depeg, and five decades of jobs migrating to cheaper labor markets abroad. The hollowing-out that followed is exactly why Tillman thinks this region needs Bitcoin more urgently than the coasts do, and why it’s “deeply ironic” that no major Bitcoin conference has ever planted a flag here.
Most industry events, he points out, have clustered in places that are still comfortably propped up by the fiat system, but not in the Rust Belt communities that felt its costs firsthand.
Unfiltered thoughts from our CEO on the Midwest Bitcoin Summit. pic.twitter.com/7f6rdcwLRW
— Midwest Bitcoin Summit (@MWBTCSummit) July 21, 2026
Orange-Pilling an Unlikely Ally
The most distinctive thing about Midwest Bitcoin Summit isn’t the location—it’s who else is in the building.
Tillman’s business partner also runs the third-largest cannabis conference in the country, and the Summit is partnering directly with the Ohio Cannabis Health and Business Summit (OCHBS), one of the largest cannabis gatherings in the U.S., normally held in Cleveland. For this event, OCHBS is relocating to Columbus to run alongside the Bitcoin conference: same venue (Greater Columbus Convention Center), same dates, separate areas, with free reciprocal access between both sides.
“We want to onboard and orange-pill as many people as possible,” said Tillman.
According to him, “the cannabis folks are the perfect low-hanging-fruit opportunity for onboarding and orange-pilling” because they live with exactly the pain points Bitcoin was built to solve: banking access, payment processing, regulatory hostility, lending discrimination. They’re already anti-establishment, already skeptical of the system, already used to operating outside it.
As Tillman puts it, “they’re Bitcoiners who don’t know it yet.”
Combine that audience with an estimated 6,000–7,000 total attendees, and you get a rare shot at onboarding a heavily capitalized, mostly self-financed industry directly into the Bitcoin ecosystem—not through online debate, but by putting cannabis operators in a room with the world’s best Bitcoin educators.
Pricing Built for Access
Tillman is equally direct about wanting to avoid the high-barrier-to-entry problem that shows up at a lot of Bitcoin events. The tiers:
- Expo Pass — $50
- General Admission — $100
- Business Pass — $400
- VIP Pass — $1,500
The reasoning behind the $50 floor, argues Tillman, is obvious: nobody holding $50 worth of Bitcoin is going to justify a $500 ticket. Pricing people out of the room defeats the entire point of growing the ecosystem in real life. On top of the tiered pricing, the Summit is offering free tickets to veterans and students, backed by an active partnership with Ohio State University’s Cryptocurrency Club to get students in the door and educated.
Tillman has also committed to not raising prices as the event approaches—what’s listed now is what it’ll cost come September.
Catalyst: The After-Party
The conference itself is one thing. The after-party is another altogether.
Branded Catalyst, the event takes over the Center of Science and Industry (COSI)—1.5 million square feet of museum space plus the outdoor Riverwalk, entirely booked out for the night. Organizers are expecting around 1,500 attendees for what may be one of the largest Bitcoin after-parties ever held, with live DJs, exhibitor activations throughout the museum, and the same cannabis-meets-Bitcoin crossover that defines the rest of the weekend.
4/ Some of the best ideas don’t happen during a panel.
They happen after.
Join us as a sponsor at Catalyst and experience the energy that continues long after Day One ends.https://t.co/u0ctUIXTVl
— Midwest Bitcoin Summit (@MWBTCSummit) July 20, 2026
The Lineup and How to Attend
The Summit has assembled roughly 120 speakers and counting. Tickets, the full agenda, and speaker announcements are all available at midwestbtc.com.
For a region that Tillman argues has waited fifty years for this conversation, Midwest Bitcoin Summit is betting that the fastest way to grow Bitcoin adoption isn’t preaching to people who are already comfortable—it’s showing up where the need is real, pricing the door low enough that anyone can walk through it, and bringing in industries that already understand what it means to be locked out of the system.