Sure, Crypto Is Crashing, but Everything Is Perfectly Fine
Wired“Grab your conviction and stay with it.” That piece of advice, doled out on Tuesday by the hosts of popular cryptocurrency podcast Bankless, Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman, encapsulates the mindset prevalent in crypto circles these days. The latest victim of the crypto crunch is Celsius, a lending platform that insights company Kaiko says has put $475 million of its customers’ money into stETH—a synthetic asset theoretically redeemable for leading cryptocurrency ethereum at some point in the future. A meme posted on Bankless’ Twitter handle features a noose-wearing James Franco at the gallows—a stand-in for crypterati who weathered the 2018 crypto crash—asking two weeping crypto holders from 2022 whether it is their “first time” there. “If you look at the fundamentals—blockchain adoptions, user expansion, real use cases being unearthed, you wouldn’t think the industry is going anywhere down,” says His Excellency Justin Sun, Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization and creator of the TRON blockchain, whose stablecoin usdd also lost its peg to the dollar last week. “We might see a scenario where bitcoin starts to rally in the next months, while the rest of the ‘alt-coins’ remain down.” The elephant in the room, however, is the fact that cryptocurrencies—assets routinely touted as a hedge against inflation and the vagaries of the financial system—are behaving exactly like the rest of the stock market.