“The tide has gone out in crypto, and we’re seeing that many of these businesses and platforms rested on shaky and unsustainable foundations,” said Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve official who teaches at Duke University Law School. Stock prices of crypto companies have cratered, retail traders are fleeing and industry executives are predicting a prolonged slump that could put more companies in jeopardy. The total value of the cryptocurrency market has dropped by about 65 percent since autumn, and analysts predict the sell-off will continue. The pullback in the crypto ecosystem illustrates the precariousness of the structure built around these risky and unregulated digital assets. On Sunday, an experimental crypto bank, Celsius, abruptly halted withdrawals.

High-profile start-ups like Terraform Labs have imploded, wiping away years of investments. Now it is crashing down.Īfter weeks of plummeting cryptocurrency prices, Coinbase said on Tuesday that it was cutting 18 percent of its employees, after layoffs at other crypto companies like Gemini, BlockFi and. Companies that market digital coins to investors flooded the airwaves with TV commercials, newfangled lending operations offered sky-high interest rates on crypto deposits and exchanges like Coinbase that allow investors to trade digital assets went on hiring sprees.Ī global industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars rose up practically overnight. Over the last two years, as the prices of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies surged, crypto start-ups proliferated. SAN FRANCISCO - No one wanted to miss out on the cryptocurrency mania.

2000 musical fortune favors the brave