What a cringe photo shoot really tells about the state of the crypto industry
The crypto world feasts on gossip and last week it enjoyed an extra helping in the form of a Vanity Fair article. The piece, titled “Crypto’s True Believers Demand to Be Taken Seriously,” featured lavish photos of prominent industry figures swooning around New York’s Nine Orchard hotel in far-out outfits that cost more than your mortgage payment. The article elicited predictable scorn and contempt from those outside the crypto world. Those inside it, meanwhile, bashed the dastardly media while tweeting some variation of “What the hell were they thinking taking part in this?”
The “what were they thinking?” take is a fair one. When a glossy publication with little history of covering the crypto industry sends a staff reporter, did anyone really expect a celebration of blockchain? Still, this is Vanity Fair, the stomping ground of legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, and renowned for snapping pics of presidents and A-list celebs. Most people, even those who profess disdain for mainstream media, would be there in a heartbeat.
Despite the snide headline, the story does a decent job telling the 17-year history of crypto, from Satoshi’s white paper to the current era of Big Crypto. The author also gets access to the right people to tell the story, and correctly sizes up their respective contributions to the industry. That includes Olaf Carlson-Wee, the out-there early Bitcoin prophet who became Coinbase’s first employee before quitting to start a crypto venture fund. Also in the group photo is iconoclast ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood, and Meltem Demirors, an early crypto booster and master self-promoter who turned up for the shoot “layered in diamond crosses and wearing a black sweatsuit with her firm’s slogan—’Believe in Something’—bedazzled across the ass.”
Billionaire trader Mike Novogratz also made the cut. Perhaps because he lent his hotel for the shoot, Novo avoided the indignity of being photographed short-sleeved, which would have revealed the giant Terra-Luna scamcoin tattoo on his bicep. Danny Ryan, a longtime contributor to the Ethereum Foundation, didn’t fare as well. The Vanity Fair photo director somehow persuaded Ryan to take off his shoes for the photos, presumably to cast him as some sort of crypto holy fool. The deepest scorn, though, is reserved for Devin Finzer, who took hundreds of millions of VC dollars for a largely failed project and, the piece makes clear, is viewed as a grifty parvenu by longtime crypto builders.
On a broader level, the piece asks where these exotic figures belong now that the crypto industry is chummy with the Oval Office, and is being embraced by Wall Street and Congress. You can make the case, as Vanity Fair implies, that the people in these photos are just a freaky subset of America’s growing aristocracy, who are fixated on image and lifestyle, and totally out of touch with ordinary people struggling with record credit card debt and an unaffordable housing market.
There is something to that. At the same time, the Vanity Fair gathering (minus Finzer) is also a throwback to a time when crypto was populated by larger than life characters who believed in something no one else did. To borrow from early Apple, they are “the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes… because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” As they fade from the scene, we may come to miss them.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com