When his family discusses crypto at Thanksgiving this year, Tyler Lucky says his parents will “slap me upside the head and say I’m dumb.”
The 28-year-old tech consultant in Virginia told his relatives all about digital currencies and non-fungible tokens at the family gathering in 2021. Now, he’s preparing himself for them to say: “I told you so.”
The crypto world is facing an existential crisis, with FTX’s sudden collapse sending shockwaves through other companies and fueling accusations that the industry is rife with fraud and Ponzi schemes. Customers of several exchanges are frozen out of their accounts with no sense of when — or even whether — they’ll get their money back. Even those who kept their coins off the troubled platforms have watched the value of their investments erode as asset prices collapsed.
It’s a stark reversal from this time last year, when digital token prices were hitting records, Wall Street institutions were joining the crypto game and cash was pouring into meme coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. Bitcoin and Ether prices have both plunged more than 75% from their all-time highs in November 2021.
True believers may be unfazed by the turmoil, but many are about to face mom and dad. Although Lucky didn’t lose any money in FTX, he’s seen the value of his investments drop in wake of the scandal.
“They’ll say, ‘Why didn’t you go into something safer?’” Lucky said, adding he expects them to ask why he didn’t invest in companies like Apple Inc. or Microsoft Corp. For that, he has a ready reply: “They haven’t done so well either.”
Table Talk
This won’t be the first year that cryptocurrencies are a topic of conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table. In 2017, as Bitcoin first topped $10,000, retail investors bought into the new space and some encouraged their families to do the same. Then, the coin’s price fell about 80% in the subsequent year.
A coin representing Bitcoin cryptocurrency on a smartphone in front of an FTX logo Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg
It appears history is repeating itself. Except this time, along with a price collapse, crypto traders are worried the FTX debacle has set the movement back years.
Megan Nyvold, a 25-year-old in Miami, expects to spend much of her Thanksgiving explaining what’s going on.
“I expect people to be very critical of the situation,” she said. “I think there's going to be a lot of, ‘I told you so.’”