Five years after he first dissected cryptocurrencies on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took another look at the sector on Sunday’s episode, after a series of high-profile and expensive busts. The most dramatic implosion was that of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange hyped by celebrities such as Steph Curry and “pre-divorce but post-love” Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, which collapsed at the end of 2022 to the tune of billions of dollars.
The arrest of FTX’s billionaire founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, on charges of defrauding investors, was “a big deal”, said Oliver, though it’s just “one of the many dominoes that fell in the crypto world”. From late 2021 until June 2022, the total market value of all cryptocurrencies fell from about $3tn to $1tn .
