• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, August 31, 2022

Being an investor in crypto is sort of like being a comic book collector.  

How so?  Well, lots of people talk about comic books, and the characters are everywhere in the movies and throughout popular culture.  Still, only a very slim portion of the audience has even bought comics in the last 10 years, and even fewer have actually kept them in the hopes they would be worth more in the future.  Also, comic collectors only sell comics to other collectors and not to a broader audience.

I saw a Pew survey In which 16% of respondents said they “invested in, traded or used a cryptocurrency” --  which was the exact same number from the year before.  That means the audience for people engaged in cryptocurrency had not risen in a year regardless, of the hype.

It’s stunning when you look at the buzz surrounding some of the most volatile asset trading in recent history.  New exchanges popped up and raised billions of dollars from corporate investors at insane valuations.  Trading volume was supposedly increasing, but it was simply a smaller universe trading among itself and taking advantage of incentives to move their assets from one platform to the next. 

Rather than increasing the audience to sell the first appearance of Miles Morales as Spiderman or Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, investors were creating artificial demand within a small universe and driving up the prices they charged to themselves.  That finite universe created the appearance of a seller’s market when viewed from the outside in general media, but when the sellers are also the buyers, you create a very insular market that is ripe to crash when the buyer’s realize they are driving up their own prices.  The rest of the world looked from the outside in, never actually engaging in the first place.

Cryptocurrency is still a niche landscape.  That doesn’t mean it won’t go mainstream in years to come, but there is still a lot of knowledge the general public needs for the crypto market to grow.  The hype is currently exceeding the value, which is dangerous when you see crypto brands on stadiums and in sports arena. Brands are betting on a future that may or may not materialize. My guess is they are betting with other people’s money, and so the fallout may never actually injure them.  Naming rights to a stadium are a gamble for any brand, and especially one that only serves 16% of the population. 

If it were up to me, the marketing campaign for these companies would be about investing.  I would be spending money to raise the general knowledge base of the audience you want to invest in crypto.  It is not just about my coin or my platform.  It is about the general industry and the opportunity.

Don’t speak to the audience about fast money.  Talk about diversification and general laws of investing.  Help them understand the correlations between crypto and other historical investments to provide them insight into the future of the category. Maybe they will invest in crypto, but maybe they will invest in stocks or bonds too.  They will always remember you as the source for the information, and will likely come back to you when the “Crypto Winter” thaws. 

Heck – maybe Marvel could help those of us with a slew of X-Men books to unload by helping the general populace understand when mutants will arrive in the MCU.  Maybe they can help remove the speculation and provide some fundamental insight that will help us offload our Wolverine books, or any of the Golden Age stuff we’ve been sitting on for years.

Or maybe my local comic-book store should gain naming rights to the local Little League complex. 

Who really knows?  It’s all a gamble anyway.