Why the Media Is Seemingly Less Interested in Bitcoin Than Ever

Three letters: SBF.
I. He was a crook.
In May 2021, I interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez together as part of a virtual crypto summit. Miami had gone all in becoming a crypto-friendly city, and the hallmark of that push was the Miami Heat making FTX its “official and exclusive cryptocurrency exchange partner,” a sponsorship that included stadium naming rights and was reportedly worth $135 million over 19 years.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s “Future of Bitcoin” package published to coincide with the fourth Bitcoin “halving” in April 2024. Daniel Roberts is the former editor in chief of Decrypt, and before that spent more than five years at Yahoo Finance and more than five years at Fortune.
It was the length of the deal that befuddled me: How could a company that had only existed for two years (FTX launched in May 2019) sign a 19-year basketball stadium naming rights commitment? How could the National Basketball Association, famously cautious about its corporate partners, feel confident this crypto exchange that appeared out of nowhere would still be around in 2040?
I asked SBF. He grinned and said, “It's a good question. Without going into the details, it's been a pretty good year for us. To the point where, frankly, we don't need to rely on the other 18 years to have the funds for this.” They could pay the full contract upfront, was his point. I couldn’t argue with that, and didn’t. I smiled like an idiot and moved on; what else was there to say? As we all know, FTX filed for bankruptcy just 18 months later.
The company’s rise always felt unsettling; its ascendancy caused some unspoken vertigo. For those of us who had been covering the industry for years, we had long known the major companies extremely well: Coinbase, DCG, Grayscale, Gemini, Circle, to name a few. FTX appeared out of thin air, founded by a supposed whiz kid trader from Jane Street.
Even saying that it launched in 2019 doesn’t adequately convey how sudden its arrival was: no one was talking about FTX until 2021, when, at peak crypto market mania, it raised $1.8 billion from venture capitalists, rabid with FOMO, at outlandish pace: $1 billion in July 2021 (Series B), then $420.69 million in October 2021 (we should have known from that choice of number it was not a real company), then $400 million in January 2022; not to mention another $400 million for the “separate” FTX.US business the same month. That’s $2.2 billion raised in six months.
I would interview SBF twice more, in January and August 2022. I was in the Bahamas in April 2022 at the circus-like FTX confab in partnership with Anthony Scaramucci’s SALT conference. It’s difficult to convey how surreal that event was. Andrew Yang and Katy Perry showed up to party and meet Sam. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen were all speakers, but their onstage panels were strictly “off the record,” a ridiculous condition (at an otherwise fully on-the-record conference) that no journalists present should have respected — and yet we all did.
Through it all, I and many others in crypto media had the sense that something here was very wrong. That’s not to say we called it or caught it. I’m not in the camp that blames the media for SBF’s celebrity (mostly he bought his stardom with marketing). But I do think we all shared the same vague feeling of dread when legacy magazine covers crowned him “the next Warren...
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/03/25/why-the-media-is-seemingly-less-interested-in-bitcoin-than-ever/
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