The crypto market had just shed another 15 percent—some $400 billion—over a matter of days. In the previous four months, the total value of cryptocurrencies had plunged nearly 50 percent, dragged down by Bitcoin, with both Ethereum and Solana dropping nearly 60 percent. The crash erased roughly $2 trillion in value and tipped the industry into a bear market known, in crypto slang, as a “winter”—a nerdy subterranean nod to Game of Thrones’ foreboding refrain: “Winter is coming.” Bison recounts stories of top founders scrambling to take companies private, close emergency equity rounds, or abandon ship altogether.
Executives at Coinbase fell conspicuously silent as its CEO, Brian Armstrong, watched an estimated $10 billion evaporate from his net worth while battling regulators in Washington. Rank-and-file traders—dismissed by OGs as tourists—either panic-sold, drifted toward shinier obsessions like AI and prediction markets, or quietly shed the identity of crypto bro altogether. “Technology without belief… technology without spirituality, is nothing.” Demirors says. “What we were building was a religious movement.” They’re all pussies, says Meltem Demirors, an early crypto investor who now runs her own firm, Crucible Capital, of her panicked peers.
On a biting February afternoon, as the market continued its slide, a small circle of true believers gathered inside a Beaux Arts landmark on the Lower East Side—a former bank once nicknamed the “temple of capitalism,” now reborn, a reported $300 million later, as the Nine Orchard hotel. Michael Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, is its newly minted co-owner. Collectively billions poorer on paper, Novogratz, Demirors, and other crypto players Olaf Carlson-Wee, Cathie Wood, and Danny Ryan compared notes—not about what they had sold, but about what they were buying. Wood, armed with reams of proprietary research, and Carlson-Wee, who insists he never follows the news, are accumulating Bitcoin.
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