Then everything changed, drastically. Spring brought”crypto winter”, in which the value of the cryptocurrency plummeted. Bitcoin started the year worth around $47,000 and is now down to around $17,000. Many NFT projects were abandoned or dragged along. The Bored Apes floor price is now around $88,000, down from $260,000 in February. Perhaps one sign of NFT’s fading luster is that a recent set of official Donald Trump NFTs were advertised simply as “trading cards.”
Public perception of cryptocurrencies collapsed even more dramatically. The recent catastrophic FTX collapse Y arrest of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried for fraud charges threatens to destabilize the entire ecosystem. FTX clients lost large amounts of money, up to $8 billion in deposits. But the biggest consequence may be that Bankman-Fried, which was well on its way to becoming a household name, appears to have handed the skeptics a victory: it sure sounds a bit like a Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? Ironically, the Larry David character in that FTX Super Bowl ad turned out to be right after all.
Technological layoffs and the fall of Meta
The entire US economy tanked this year, and tech companies saw their stocks drop sharply along with it. In the second half of the year, large technology companies such as Amazon, Goal, Snap, Sales force, Lyft, and more had layoffs. Industry-wide, an estimated 150,000 tech jobs will have been eliminated by 2022, according to the site. Layoffs.for your information. For workers who came from outside the US to pursue the American dream of lucrative and prestigious tech jobs, these cuts were especially brutalas 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 shares have plummeted 67% since the start of the year. In February, the company announced that, for the first time, the number of Facebook users had decreased. In November, cut Meta 11,000 jobs Y shut down production of Portal, his video chat device, as well as the portable devices he was developing. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg attributed the cuts in part to over-expansion during the pandemic.
