Bitcoin falls below $ 20,000 for the first time since November 2020
Square, another payment company, bought $ 50 million in Bitcoin and changed its name to Block, in part to mark the work on blockchain technology. Tesla bought $ 1.5 billion of it. The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz raised $ 4.5 billion for a fourth cryptocurrency-focused fund, a doubling of the previous one.
Tensions peaked in April last year when Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, was listed at a valuation of $ 85 billion, an upcoming celebration for the industry. Bitcoin topped $ 60,000 for the first time.
Last summer, El Salvador announced that it would be the first country to classify Bitcoin as a legal tender, along with the US dollar. The country̵[ads1]7;s president updated his Twitter profile photo to include laser eyes, a calling card for Bitcoin believers. The value of El Salvador’s $ 105 million investment in Bitcoin has been halved as prices have fallen.
Senators and mayors around the United States began to claim cryptocurrency, as the industry spent a lot of money on lobbying. New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected in November, said he would take his first three paychecks in Bitcoin. Senators Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, and Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, proposed legislation that would create a regulatory framework for the industry, and give more authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency openly courted by cryptocurrencies.
Through the madness, celebrities promoted the fear of missing something, they whipped their NFTs on talk shows and talked about blockchain projects on social media. This year, the Super Bowl featured four ads for crypto companies, including Matt Damon, who warned viewers that “happiness favors the brave.”
Violent optimism faltered this spring as the stock market fell, inflation rose and redundancies hit the technology sector. Investors began to lose confidence in their crypto investments, moving money to less risky assets. Several high-profile projects crashed during retreats. TerraForm Labs, which created TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin, and Celsius, an experimental crypto bank, both collapsed, wiping out billions in value and setting the wider market in motion.
