Kinguin&Friends Came to Istanbul. Feriye Palace Was the Right Call

Kinguin&Friends doesn't do the typical conference circuit. By the time the series brought its Istanbul edition to Feriye Palace in February 2018, it had already earned a reputation for putting genuine conversations on stage instead of rehearsed ones. The agenda that day sat at the intersection of crypto, blockchain, and esports investment, three areas that were moving fast and colliding in ways nobody had fully mapped yet.

Feriye Palace was the right call for a venue. A 19th-century Ottoman waterfront building in Ortakoy, right on the Bosphorus, it has the kind of atmosphere that makes people feel like what they're saying actually matters.

Setimedia handled local coordination and on-site operations for the event. Deniz Gormez ran ground operations. Setimedia Co-Founder Tugbek Olek steered the overall project. The work involved is the kind that disappears when done right: scheduling, speaker logistics, the moment-to-moment flow that keeps a full-day program from turning into a slog. Nobody in the audience thinks about that. That's the point.

Viktor Romaniuk Wanli hosted, with Maciej Sawicki setting the tone early. The speaker lineup brought together international names, Callum Laing, Kim Rom, Robert Kalbarczyk, alongside strong local voices: Ozgur Guneri, Fatih Guner, Aras Senyuz, Can Gursu, Alemsah Ozturk. That balance wasn't incidental. Istanbul has its own esports ecosystem, its own crypto community, and its own read on where this space is heading. The panels that worked best treated it that way.

When the microphones went off, the conversations moved to the courtyards and hallways and kept going. That's the only real measure of whether a conference day landed.