Square, another payment company, bought $ 50 million in bitcoins and changed its name to Block, in part to mark its work with blockchain technology. Tesla bought $ 1.5 billion from him. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz raised $ 4.5 billion for a fourth cryptocurrency-focused fund, doubling the previous one.
The excitement peaked in April last year when Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, went public at an estimated $ 85 billion, an exit party for the industry. Bitcoin topped $ 60,000 for the first time.
Last summer, El Salvador announced it would be the first country to classify bitcoin as legal tender, along with the US dollar. The country’s president updated his Twitter account photo to include laser eyes, a business card for bitcoin believers. El Salvador’s $ 105 million investment in bitcoin has been halved as the price has fallen.
Senators and mayors in the United States have begun advertising cryptocurrencies as the industry spends heavily on lobbying. New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected in November, said he would take his first three salaries in bitcoin. Senators Cynthia Loomis, a Wyoming Republican, and Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, have proposed legislation that would create a regulatory framework for the industry, giving more power to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency openly courted by crypto companies.
Through madness, celebrities fueled the fear of missing out by whipping their NFTs on talk shows and talking about blockchain projects on social media. This year’s Super Bowl includes four ads for crypto companies, including Matt Damon, who warns viewers that “the state favors the brave.”
This overbearing optimism was lost this spring as the stock market collapsed, inflation rose and cuts hit the technology sector. Investors began to lose confidence in their crypto investments, moving money into less risky assets. Several high-profile projects collapsed amid draws. TerraForm Labs, which created TerraUSD, the so-called stable coin, and Celsius, an experimental crypto bank, collapsed, destroying billions in value and sending the wider market into congestion.
Add Comment