“Maybe they’re not dead,” he said. “But their dreams of making it rich in crypto certainly are.”
On the screens behind his back was football player Odell Beckham Jr. who announced in November 2021 that he would take his salary in Bitcoin shortly before its value started to plummet. Then boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and the rapper and music producer DJ Khaled, who was fined in 2018 by the Securities and Exchange Commission for promoting digital tokens without disclosing that they were paid to do so.
Then flashed an image of Kim Kardashian, who in October agreed to a $1.26 million settlement with the SEC for failing to comply with the agency’s rules for promoting investment opportunities.
The pictures kept coming. One featured the August-September 2022 issue of Fortune magazine, with Mr. Bankman-Fried on the cover, with the headline “The Next Warren Buffett?” The Fat Jewish predicted that Mr Bankman-Fried’s “trading habit” would soon include “trading cigarettes for toilet paper in prison”.
Also seen on the screens was YouTube star turned media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. His NFT startup, Candy Digital, was once valued at $1.5 billion. Earlier this week, the company laid off “much of its staff,” according to Decrypt, the crypto industry news site owned by Decrypt Media, the parent company of Decrypt Studios, the organizer of Crypties.
It turned out that the person who presented the first Cryptie Prize was Avery Akkineni, the president of another of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s companies, Vayner3. In what was by no means the warmest exchange of the night, Ms. Akkineni walked on stage, gave a terse note of thanks to The Fat Jewish and defended her boss, Mr. Vaynerchuk, calling him an “utter pleasure” to work for.
After reading the list of nominees for Game of the Year, Ms. Akkineni opened an envelope and revealed the winner: Crypto Unicorns, a pet and farming game created on the Polygon blockchain, backed by a digital token called MATIC. Katrina Wolfe, Laguna Games’ director of product, accepted the award, but several other winners failed to show up.
