Remember when cryptocurrency used to be the talk of the town? You couldn’t go anywhere during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, or even as recently as the first half of 2022, without hearing your friends talk about how much they’d won (or lost) in crypto, how they wish they had gotten into the trend earlier, and how NFTs were the next big thing. But things are much different this year.

As proof of that, let’s look at one of the best illustrations of what’s trending in Western society: the Super Bowl ads. In 2022, crypto companies spent a combined $39 million buying Super Bowl spots. The following year, there was not a single crypto ad to be seen.

Why is that? The crypto industry has fallen on hard times in the months since last year’s Super Bowl. Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency lending company, announced, “Due to extreme market conditions, today we are announcing that Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, Swap, and transfers between accounts” before shutting down mid-year. Later in November, FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms, declared bankruptcy.

Since these two institutions went dark, the currencies themselves 22,000 in existence today