Why Crypto Just Won’t Die

Can someone remind crypto that it’s supposed to be dead? The digital asset market, widely written off as a bubble that burst two years ago, is having one of its wildest rallies ever. The price of bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, has risen by nearly 60 percent in the past month. This morning it reached a new all-time high of about $69,000, breaking the previous record, set in November 2021. The rest of the crypto market isn’t far behind.

This feels impossible. Fifteen years into its existence, the technology has yet to demonstrate any serious use case. Its value ads, now awaits sentencing for fraud from a Brooklyn . Celebrities who shamelessly hawked crypto exchanges and NFT collections have gone quiet, in some cases . The 2022 Super Bowl felt like one long crypto ad; by this year’s game, the world had moved on to other speculative fads—generative AI, Taylor Swift—and crypto seemed like just another faded relic of the zero-interest-rate era.