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Opinion
The Editors

Crypto’s Wild Week Offers a Much-Needed Warning

This stuff isn’t ready for prime time.

But not the greater fool.

But not the greater fool.

Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
By

It's been a wild week in the world of crypto.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in ephemeral wealth evaporated as the price of Bitcoin plunged to its lowest point since 2020, down more than 50% in about six months. The exchange Coinbase dropped to about a fifth of last year’s initial public offering price. An algorithmic stablecoin called TerraUSD, a digital token that purported to be worth a dollar, melted down along with the blind confidence it had relied on.