This article comes from:Vanity Fair

Translation｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina); Translator｜Moni

“I really can't take it anymore.”

During a few days in early February this year, the Signal inbox of a large crypto market maker filled up with dozens of such messages. The crypto market fell 15% again—within just a few days, $400 billion in market value evaporated. In the previous four months, the total market value of cryptocurrencies plunged nearly 50% under Bitcoin's drag, with Ethereum and Solana seeing declines close to 60%. This crash erased about $2 trillion in value and dragged the industry into a bear market, referred to in the crypto circle as "winter"—this somewhat nerdy metaphor pays homage to the disquieting line from "Game of Thrones": “Winter is coming.”

Project founders were in a panic: some urgently tried to privatize, some hastily started emergency equity financing, while others simply abandoned ship and left the scene. Frankly speaking, veterans of the crypto industry had experienced even more severe downturns—the market had once plunged by 80% or even 90%, but this time, the chill felt exceptionally different.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was grappling with regulators in Washington while watching his personal net worth evaporate by about $10 billion. Internal conflicts within Ethereum were bubbling under the surface, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted anxiously about concerns regarding the platform's scalability; as an early supporter of Polymarket, he expressed discontent about the blockchain prediction market going in a dangerously addictive direction. Ordinary traders were labeled “tourists” by industry veterans, either panic-selling or turning to hipper trends like artificial intelligence and prediction markets.

Without faith and spiritual support, technology is nothing; what we have built is a religious movement

“They are all cowards.”

Early crypto investor and current founder of Crucible Capital, Meltem Demirors, evaluated her panic-stricken peers in this way. She wore stacked diamond crosses and a black tracksuit, with the company's slogan emblazoned on her backside—“Hold the faith.”

In this crypto winter, she began to buy back Bitcoin.

On a February afternoon, as the market continued to decline, a small group of true believers gathered in a mixed-art landmark building in Manhattan's Lower East Side—once a bank dubbed the “Temple of Capitalism,” now a $300 million transformed Nine Orchard hotel, where Galaxy Digital CEO Michael Novogratz had recently become a co-owner.

After their collective wealth shrank by billions, Michael Novogratz, Meltem Demirors, and core crypto leaders like Olaf Carlson-Wee, “Cathie Wood,” and Danny Ryan gathered to share experiences — they weren't discussing what to sell off, but what they were buying.

Cathie Wood had access to vast exclusive research data, while Olaf Carlson-Wee insisted he never paid attention to the news, and both were actively increasing their Bitcoin holdings. Danny Ryan was unfazed by daily fluctuations: “I’m a Luddite,” he declared, “Whatever I need to know, someone will tell me.”

“Technology without faith,” Meltem Demirors emphasized again, “technology without a spiritual core is worthless.” Unlike the disciples who doubted Jesus's resurrection, the loyal believers in crypto remained unwavering. “To be honest, what we are building is a religious movement.”

Gold, commodities, real estate, bonds, stocks—all asset classes are answering the same question: where does value come from? In fact, they are products of social consensus; they have meaning only because of collective recognition.

Gold: its value comes from nature and scarcity; bonds: from institutional trust; real estate: from land and permanence; commodities: from the materials themselves; stocks: from human creativity.

Every asset requires a creation myth, from scarcity to capitalism itself. In the eyes of those who firmly believe that cryptocurrency is the “sixth asset class,” the value of cryptocurrencies extends far beyond the financial realm. “Ever since the dollar decoupled from gold in 1971, I have been waiting for this day,” Cathie Wood recalled, as the economist of the Reagan era and proponent of the Laffer Curve, Arthur Laffer, once told her. Cathie Wood's actively managed ETF focused on disruptive technology, and she asked Arthur Laffer, “How big can this concept actually get?” The answer revealed the ultimate fantasy of early believers in crypto: “What do you think the scale of the U.S. money supply is?”

On Halloween 2008, six weeks after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers—America's fourth-largest investment bank and the myth of institutional safety crumbled completely—a mysterious individual operating under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto silently sent a 9-page PDF document titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to a handful of cryptographers. This “white paper” outlined a completely new financial system bypassing banks, governments, and central institutions like the Federal Reserve, protecting ordinary people from inflation, asset freezes, and the arbitrary manipulation of monetary policy. Bitcoin ensured self-security through “mining”—using dedicated computers to compete in solving cryptographic puzzles—while asset access relied on a unique mnemonic phrase: losing this phrase meant permanent loss of funds; remembering it allowed recovery of wealth anywhere globally without permission.

In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto turned Bitcoin from theory into reality by mining the genesis block. Once the rules were established, the anti-counterfeiting mechanisms launched, and Bitcoin began circulating (then still worthless), he vanished completely. This withdrawal not only deepened the mythological quality of Bitcoin but also gave it true decentralization: no omnipotent controller remained; this experiment belonged to everyone and belonged to no one.

“I fell in love with Bitcoin at first sight,” said Erik Voorhees, founder of the ShapeShift exchange and Venice AI. In 2011, while participating in the Libertarian Free State Project in New Hampshire, he discovered Bitcoin: “I felt Bitcoin could conquer the world; it couldn’t be devalued, no individual or institution could control it, and no one could stop it.”

This movement took root on the social margins, its followers a group of rebels from the post-financial crisis era: disappointed in reality, yearning for social and political change. Early believers were mostly young, male, and deeply addicted to the internet, forming their own echo chambers in forums. They firmly believed cryptography could achieve what regulators had never done: redistribute power—Michael Novogratz, dressed in a new Valentino red suit, described it, “Bitcoin is like the rebels in ‘Star Wars.’”

From “Marginal Rebels” to Mainstream Power

Crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital founder Carlson-Wee said: “Once you truly understand Bitcoin, you can never look away.” In 2011, as a senior at Vassar College, he first encountered Bitcoin online and quickly became convinced that cryptocurrency was the future of global finance, even persuading his thesis advisor to allow him to write his thesis on it. After graduation, Carlson-Wee worked as a lumberjack in Washington State, sending cold emails of his resume and thesis to Coinbase, which was then operating out of an apartment in San Francisco, and within days he was hired as the company's first employee. “In those early days, it felt like everyone was guarding a secret unknown to the world.”

When the "Occupy Wall Street" movement rang alarm bells about growing wealth disparity in America, the financial self-sufficiency and global financial inclusion advocated by cryptocurrencies resonated with a generation—they witnessed trillions in household wealth evaporate while the government stepped in to rescue banks. “The first day I walked into the trading hall was the day after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt,” Arthur Hayes said. At that time, he was stuck on a remote island in Japan, snowed in, with an unshaved beard, wearing a red thermal t-shirt. “Starting a financial career this way is very special.”

Arthur Hayes had once rooted himself in traditional finance: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup. But witnessing colleagues laid off during the market collapse led him to seek assets he could control—first gold, then Bitcoin in 2013. By 2014, he was unemployed and living on a friend's couch.

At 28, Arthur Hayes co-founded BitMEX, bringing Wall Street-level leverage and derivatives to crypto trading, ultimately creating the "perpetual contract." Traders could bet on Bitcoin's price rise and fall without holding any Bitcoin, using 5x, 50x, or even 100x leverage. “Some lost everything; some became millionaires overnight.” Arthur Hayes calmly remarked; the fates of early believers often settled within minutes.

The "perpetual contract" ignited market flames, creating a scale of tens of trillions and giving rise to a new generation of "crypto gamblers"—willing to take immense risks for the chance of earning millions.

Cryptocurrency had thus become a casino.

No one is in control; who decides the future? This is the core of crypto, as well as its fatal flaw. From ethical application scenarios to whether Bitcoin's ecosystem should expand to new tokens, divisions are everywhere. But it is this chaotic coalition of libertarians, venture capitalists, builders, traders, and fraudsters that ultimately pushed cryptocurrency into the mainstream.

Just as Arthur Hayes made Bitcoin seem more like gambling than gold in the same year, a 20-year-old Vitalik Buterin—lean and a Thiel scholarship recipient, who seemed destined for Balenciaga runways—completely upended the industry.

One day in 2014, Joseph Lubin took Michael Novogratz to Brooklyn to meet with members of the Ethereum Foundation— the next year, the Ethereum platform officially launched. Through “smart contracts”—automated codes running on the blockchain—Ethereum allowed developers to build a complete financial system: lending platforms, digital art markets, decentralized organizations. No banks, no corporate overlords, only code.

“Joseph Lubin almost experienced a religious conversion,” Michael Novogratz said, “Ethereum will change the world, save the world.” The entire economic system is migrating on-chain, stablecoins supporting fragile third-world currencies, open-source finance replacing the opacity of traditional banking. “I was already wealthy and didn’t need the world to be saved, but I felt Ethereum was interesting.”

“I never had an epiphany moment with Bitcoin.” Danny Ryan, co-founder and president of Etherealize, said. With temperatures below zero in New York, he had his long hair braided, wearing a thin black t-shirt and a denim jacket, with a plastic yellow nose ring he claimed helped with breathing. Danny Ryan's awakening moment came in 2016 when he discovered Ethereum, and by January 2017, he devoted himself to Vitalik Buterin's foundation, quickly getting hired—just as cryptocurrencies were surging into the mainstream.

“That was a crazy golden age.” Meltem Demirors recalled.

At a conference in November 2017, she watched ethereal "geeks" in unicorn t-shirts and Hawaiian shirts help investors from Goldman Sachs and a16z set up MetaMask wallets and participate in initial coin offerings.

Subsequently, Bitcoin broke through $10,000, and the total market value of cryptocurrencies skyrocketed from $16 billion to a peak of $535 billion, with an annual growth rate exceeding 3200%.

With the emergence of Ethereum, the crypto world was no longer limited to a single token, a creation myth, or a single idea. Anyone could build anything, breaking singularity and tearing apart cohesion. The U.S. government consistently felt helpless against this industry, originally aiming to evade centralization; in the eyes of regulators, cryptocurrencies represented an impenetrable web of scams.

In the next decade, the market swung repeatedly between fervor and collapse; countless people's life savings turned to dust, while a select few who timed capitalizing perfectly created generation-defining wealth. Yet within the crypto ecosystem, the rifts were massive: veterans vs tourists, idealists vs fraudsters, builders vs traders.

Two Types of People in the Crypto Community: Believers and Fraudsters

The crypto community is divided into two types of people—

The first type is believers: those who philosophically align with the original ideals of Bitcoin, caring about decentralization, privacy, and personal sovereignty. They are slandered simply because their principles contradict modern institutions (especially governments and their allied chartered banks).

The second type is fraudsters: those who drive Lamborghinis selling meme coins, lacking principles, most entering the arena only after 2017. They range from outright frauds to those with a slight speculative mindset, to ignorant fools.

A crypto holder using the pseudonym “Moose” pulled out a Palauan ID—a territorial document from the Pacific island Micronesia he purchased online for $200, which serves as his proof to access offshore derivatives platforms that American users cannot utilize. “Everyone does it,” he said. At 27, like many men his age, he first encountered cryptocurrencies in the mid-2010s while buying drugs and fake IDs on the Silk Road website; his idols are not athletes or film stars, but anonymous Twitter accounts with anime avatars and obscure descriptions, whose trading movements are followed piously by their fans.

Jordan Fish, at another level of the same circle, using the username “Cobie,” with a Telegram profile picture of a leaping white puppy, profited early on the Ethereum staking protocol Lido and later founded the membership-based crypto investment platform Echo, valued at over $300 million. “In 2019, being a cryptobro was pretty cool, but now, it’s not cool at all.”

As crypto moves from the margins to the mainstream, ultimately becoming a cultural joke, its promise of disruptive innovation fades. Those who once prided themselves on being rebels increasingly resemble other deeply addicted youth: playing games, trading memes—the poor image only exacerbated the situation.

In 2023, Arthur Hayes attracted thousands at the TOKEN2049 conference party in Singapore, running out of drinks within the first hour, ultimately requiring security to fend off drunken attendees desperately trying to breach the venue. At the same conference two years later in Dubai, Carlson-Wee jetted back and forth between California and the UAE (reportedly collaborating on local government projects), partying on the Lotus superyacht with DogeOS CEO Jordan Jefferson, who wore a t-shirt with “Habibi Doge”—a Shiba Inu donning an Emirati traditional headdress. (A UAE-related company had once injected $500 million into Trump's family crypto projects before he took office).

“Everyone thinks that if you make money in the crypto circle, you’ll be in a yacht in Miami surrounded by a hundred prostitutes. I spent three days at La Guérite during the Ethereum conference in Cannes,” Meltem Demirors said, “I drank so much I crawled on the table. Ethereum believers hate beautiful things, hate pleasure; they just want you to eat tofu and wear organic cotton, torturing yourself.”

Another Creature in the Crypto Circle: “Whales”

Whales are the behemoths of the Bitcoin world.

In crypto slang, whales refer to individuals holding over 1,000 Bitcoins, often possessing digital assets worth over $10 billion. Their single transactions can shake the market, and these whales remain entirely anonymous, never attending meetings, hosting parties, or posting controversial tweets: the loudest voices in crypto are never the wealthiest.

Being anonymous was once an ideological resistance against centralization; now it is essential for survival. Showing one’s face in the crypto circle is inviting trouble. The industry sees dozens of violent incidents each year: kidnappings, home invasions, armed robberies. Massive data leaks expose asset holdings, transforming digital wealth into real attack targets. Last year, a crypto holder in Nolita claimed to have been kidnapped and tortured for two weeks while being forced to reveal passwords before narrowly escaping.

“I no longer want to be a public figure,” Fish said, because “it can probably lead to personal danger.” OpenSea co-founder Devin Finzer and his wife Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo are followed around by a security guard who looks more like a Viking than a Secret Service agent. “That’s our bodyguard.”

The crypto circle has long survival rules, the secret being: never become the protagonist. I am a side character; everyone knows me, but no one truly knows why I exist.

On the morning the party for *Vanity Fair* was filmed, Cathie Wood didn’t recognize Meltem Demirors, who she hadn’t seen in a decade. “You look younger than before,” Cathie Wood said as she embraced her. “Because I’m rich now,” Meltem Demirors replied with a mischievous smile. Carlson-Wee introduced himself to Cathie Wood as if he were a young boy meeting his idol; they immediately began discussing the years when they were regarded as crazy by everyone, sharing a firm belief of “buying during market downturns” while gently sidestepping the reality of cryptocurrencies plummeting nearly 50% within three months.

Michael Novogratz walked in wearing a long silver down coat, enthusiastically greeting everyone before complaining about being on day two of a serious hangover—he described the previous Saturday night's revelry, peaking with a 4 AM visit to the New York nightclub Gospël inspired by Burning Man, praying that his 30-year-old daughter and her new husband, who lived nearby, did not see it.

Ryan lingered in the corner of the room, watching with a mix of amusement and horror. Meltem Demirors and her assistant sifted through the outfits they had brought with them. Michael Novogratz agonized over whether to choose rhinestone-studded black suits or Valentino, while Ryan brought only two pairs of pants, his favorite pair having a hole in the crotch, yet he wore them anyway. “It’s too hot,” he complained, while the hairstylist dried his thick, shoulder-length hair.

“Where is Devin Finzer?” Meltem Demirors asked.

Devin Finzer and his wife Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo were in a private suite on the fourth floor, attended by a personal assistant, security, and high-profile makeup artists, surrounded by upscale custom outfits.

In the end, after considering millions of dollars worth of high fashion clothing, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo chose a non-custom Armani gown, and did not wear any JAR jewelry.

In 2017, Devin Finzer founded the NFT marketplace OpenSea—in the eyes of crypto veterans and even his wife, he has missed a key threshold to be considered an OG. His background is the dream of a Silicon Valley mother: raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, a Brown University graduate majoring in computer science and mathematics, and a former software engineer at Pinterest.

When the crypto surge began, Devin Finzer and his friend Alex Atallah decided to create an eBay for digital assets. Inspired by Ethereum's tokenization and especially the digital cat trading platform CryptoKitties, OpenSea came into being.

Not long after, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. Bored young people flocked into the crypto universe, and NFTs skyrocketed.

In 2021, Beeple's NFT artwork sold for $69 million at Christie's, while collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks became status symbols comparable to Rolex and Porsche, with some even spending over a million dollars on a digital collage.

By January 2022, OpenSea's valuation soared to $13 billion. That year, young Devin Finzer found himself overwhelmed in a rapidly growing company, unexpectedly joining Silicon Valley's top social circles, where he met Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo.

“Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo is like a hot girl with a Ferrari engine inside her.” Devin Finzer said.

Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo expressed that even before the 2022 crypto crash and NFT bubble burst, she had voiced her concerns about OpenSea to Devin Finzer, but no one listened. She believed OpenSea was following trends too closely, that Devin Finzer was immature and shortsighted, failing to pivot towards a more sustainable direction.

“Everyone was singing Devin Finzer's praises—Forbes cover, 29 years old, handsome, everyone wanted to charter a flight to send him to the Super Bowl and attend every banquet.” Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo paused, “I was not interested in any of this.”

“This has been a humbling journey,” Devin Finzer added quietly, “even if everyone puts you on a pedestal, you still have so much to learn.”

The market collapse had been brewing for months—

In 2021, Bitcoin dropped from its peak of $69,000 to $16,000, signaling the industry's harshest winter. OpenSea's valuation plummeted by about 90%.

In May 2022, Terra/Luna crashed, wiping out over $40 billion in value in 72 hours, leaving retail investors empty-handed. One of crypto's largest hedge funds, Three Arrows Capital, quickly collapsed thereafter.

In November 2022, industry darling SBF's exchange FTX dramatically crumbled within a week, leading to his arrest and conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, with customer funds misappropriated totaling up to $10 billion.

“Devin Finzer is not the first genius kid I’ve mentored,” Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo did not elaborate. As the company crumbled and the NFT bubble burst, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo became Devin Finzer's “product mom,” treating him as a “custom teddy bear.” Now, they claim to be relaunching OpenSea with a grander vision.

However, not everyone shares the same certainty as Devin Finzer and Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo.

The more mature blockchain infrastructure becomes, the harder it is to explain the features that OpenSea can offer that platforms like Coinbase and Gemini cannot. Successful projects have raised the bar—like Hyperliquid and Uniswap, which now share profits with token holders. Most tokens cannot compete with them, as issuance is primarily for governance, and holders only have voting rights on protocol decisions, with no direct economic rights.

The collapse of FTX not only plunged the entire industry into the abyss but also triggered a so-called “witch hunt” in the crypto circle: regulators acted in concert, trying to snuff out technology they neither understood nor controlled. Regulators viewed the crypto world as the Wild West; even if the rules were imperfect, protecting U.S. investors was a good start.

Biden appointed Gary Gensler to lead the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission—this former Goldman Sachs partner and MIT blockchain professor understands cryptocurrencies better than any other regulator. Gary Gensler's goal is to tame this industry, and the core question is: are cryptocurrencies securities or commodities? The answer determines everything: securities fall under the purview of the SEC, requiring exchanges and token issuers to register, disclose, and comply with investor protection rules designed for stocks—rules meant for centralized institutions and not for assets that can circulate globally without banks, brokers, or borders.

Imposing traditional financial regulatory models on technology based on autonomy, privacy, anonymity, and breaking global boundaries is destined to fail. The crypto circle labels it “enforcement-style regulation”: Gary Gensler charged multiple companies with violating securities laws, aggressively squeezing crypto-friendly banks out of the system.

“The SEC at that time wanted to wipe out crypto through lawsuits,” Ryan said. He recalled receiving a subpoena while setting the dinner table on Easter Sunday 2024. “I was the highest-ranking person in the Ethereum Foundation in the U.S.”

Arthur Hayes was sentenced to six months of house arrest in May 2022 after admitting BitMEX deliberately did not implement anti-money laundering controls—specifically, BitMEX allowed U.S. customers to access the platform via VPN; he had boasted at a conference that bribing Seychelles officials was cheaper than complying with U.S. regulations. Binance CEO CZ had it worse, sentenced to four months of federal prison in April 2024 for assisting money laundering; Binance paid a $4.3 billion fine, setting one of the largest corporate fines in U.S. history.

Subsequently, Trump made his second appearance. In 2021, he called Bitcoin a scam, but merely three years later, he delivered a keynote speech at a Bitcoin conference, pledging to make America the “global crypto capital.” Although Trump’s values sharply contrast with the global utopian vision of crypto believers, his support for the industry is enough to win votes.

“No U.S. political party is inherently supportive or opposed to crypto,” Arthur Hayes said. If crypto investors become single-issue voters, the question before politicians becomes one: “Should we court them?”

“I might be the only person in the crypto circle who hasn’t voted for Trump.” Michael Novogratz said. As a major donor to progressive causes, he has tried to persuade Elizabeth Warren to meet with him to discuss industry affairs for years, all in vain. “This industry is still filled with political controversy, which it shouldn't be; it should be bipartisan consensus. We need rules; innovation hasn’t been occurring because there are no rules.”

In the last few months before Trump’s re-election, Ryan received a letter: the case was dismissed. Ryan's lawyer claimed to have never seen the SEC act this way. “The best outcome would be if they never contacted you again.” And this time, the securities fraud charges disappeared.

According to Ryan, the Biden administration realized the slim advantages in the U.S. presidential elections could no longer afford to alienate the entire tech industry. The crypto industry ultimately poured $135 million into the 2024 election campaign, with reportedly most flowing to Republican candidates, with supported districts winning over 90% of the time.

In 2025, Trump launched his own meme coin, TRUMP, which at one point reached a market value of $10 billion but later plummeted by 80%. After taking office, he granted clemency to Arthur Hayes and CZ (SBF remains in prison).

Conclusion

In different people's eyes, as cryptocurrencies penetrate mainstream systems, it is either a complete betrayal of original ideals or proof of experimental success. Some of the most committed decentralization believers now appear in closed-door meetings at the White House. Those holding cryptocurrencies include not only ordinary people but also sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and corporations equipped with private wealth managers. This movement, which was born to render Wall Street ineffective, has now become its most powerful lobbying force, its most reliable customer.

“We won,” Moose said, “but after winning, does cryptocurrency become another ordinary asset class?”

Has the crypto industry turned into something it once despised? Or is it changing the world from within?

In the midst of winter, the answer still drifts on the wind, while those believers continue to stand their ground, holding fast to their faith.

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