Square, one other payments company, bought $50 million of Bitcoin and adjusted its name to Block, partially to suggest its work with blockchain technology. Tesla bought $1.5 billion of it. The enterprise capital firm Andreessen Horowitz raised $4.5 billion for a fourth cryptocurrency-focused fund, doubling its previous one.
Excitement hit a peak in April last yr when Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, went public at an $85 billion valuation, a coming-out party for the industry. Bitcoin topped $60,000 for the primary time.
Last summer, El Salvador announced that it will grow to be the primary country to categorise Bitcoin as legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar. The country’s president updated his Twitter profile picture to incorporate laser eyes, a calling card of Bitcoin believers. The worth of El Salvador’s $105 million investment in Bitcoin has been slashed in half as the value has fallen.
Senators and mayors around america began touting cryptocurrency, because the industry spent heavily on lobbying. Mayor Eric Adams of Recent York, who was elected in November, said he would take his first three paychecks in Bitcoin. Senators Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of Recent York, proposed laws that will create a regulatory framework for the industry, giving more authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency that crypto corporations have openly courted.
Through the frenzy, celebrities fueled the fear of missing out, flogging their NFTs on talk shows and talking up blockchain projects on social media. This yr, the Super Bowl featured 4 ads for crypto corporations, including Matt Damon warning viewers that “fortune favors the brave.”
That swaggering optimism faltered this spring because the stock market plummeted, inflation soared and layoffs hit the tech sector. Investors began losing confidence of their crypto investments, moving money to less dangerous assets. Several high-profile projects crashed amid withdrawals. TerraForm Labs, which created TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin, and Celsius, an experimental crypto bank, each collapsed, wiping out billions in value and sending the broader market right into a tailspin.
