A world emerged in which everything revolved around human greed.
(Photo: Reuters)
If you want to know how deep the crash of the crypto world was, you should look at the TV advertising for the Super Bowl this year and last year: The comparison illustrates how an entire industry was disenchanted and in some cases collapsed.
The NFL final is the biggest sporting event of the year in the United States. A 30-second commercial costs around 6.5 million dollars. That’s why it was an exclamation point that the crypto world set last year: Four companies from the industry switched to advertising – Coinbase, Crypto.com, Etoro and FTX. This earned the Super Bowl 2022 the nickname “Crypto Bowl”.
52 weeks later, the market value of all cyber currencies has collapsed by almost 50 percent, various crypto projects crashed, a former star was arrested, companies fired employees in droves, and investors withdrew around 1.4 trillion dollars from the market at its peak.
So it’s no wonder there was no crypto ads at this year’s Super Bowl. Apart from the costs, it would probably have been difficult to find stars who would give their faces for advertising. Because the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the role of comedian Larry David, ex-football player Tom Brady and basketball star Steph Curry, all of whom promoted FTX.
At FTX, the commercial looks particularly grotesque a year later. There, cryptocurrencies were compared to great inventions like the wheel or the light bulb. Today, FTX is broke and founder and longtime boss Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial on fraud charges.
FTX is unrivaled in its magnitude, it is not an isolated case. In May, the payment platform Terra/Luna crashed, followed later by the hedge fund Three Arrows, then the credit platform Celsius and the stock exchange Genesis.
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What emerged was a world centered around human greed; about collecting more and more money for increasingly risky bets. When prices stopped rising, when bets on ever-rising prices stopped working, this fantasy bubble burst.
Therefore, just one year after the Crypto Bowl, which was celebrated as a breakthrough to the mainstream, the crypto world feels further away from mainstream society than ever before. Ultimately, the critics who warned of the opaque industry and massive risks for private investors were right.
They still have to prove that crypto advocates also have a point when they point to the advantages of decentralized cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology.
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