Then, everything changed — drastically. The spring brought “crypto winter,” in which the value of cryptocurrency plummeted. Bitcoin started the year valued at around $47,000 and has now dropped to around $17,000. Many NFT projects were abandoned or shuffled along. The floor price for Bored Apes now hovers around $88,000, down from around $260,000 in February. Perhaps a sign of the loss of shine on NFTs is that a recent set of official Donald Trump NFTs was advertised merely as “trading cards.”
Public perception of crypto cratered even more dramatically. The recent catastrophic collapse of FTX and arrest of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried on fraud charges threatens to destabilize the entire ecosystem. FTX customers lost serious amounts of money — as much as $8 billion in deposits. But the biggest fallout may be that Bankman-Fried, who was on his way to becoming a household name, seems to have given the skeptics a win: It sure all does seem a little like a Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? Ironically, Larry David’s character in that FTX Super Bowl ad turned out to be right after all.
Tech layoffs and Meta’s decline
The entire US economy took a dip this year, and tech companies saw their stocks drop dramatically along with it. In the second half of the year, big tech firms like Amazon, Meta, Snap, Salesforce, Lyft, and more had layoffs. Across the industry, an estimated 150,000 tech jobs have been shed in 2022, according to the site Layoffs.fyi. For workers who came from outside the US to pursue the American dream of lucrative and prestigious tech jobs, these cuts were especially brutal, since laid-off visa holders had to get new jobs within 60 days or leave the country.
No fall was perhaps as dramatic as that of Meta, whose stock has plunged 67% from the start of the year. In February, the company announced that, for the first time ever, Facebook’s user numbers had gone down. In November, Meta cut 11,000 jobs and shut down production of Portal, its video-chatting device, as well as wearables it was developing. CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed the cuts partly to overexpansion during the pandemic.
