Niall Ferguson, Columnist

If You Held On for Dear Life, It's a Merry Cryptomas!

Blockchain currencies didn't just survive the collapse of FTX, they’ve been the investment of the year. Turns out, decentralized finance doesn't need exchanges.

December 17, 2023 at 5:00 AM UTC

By Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.” He is a columnist for The Free Press.

Ornamental.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

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It's Merry Cryptomas, everybody! Bitcoin is up 167% year-to-date. Ethereum is up 91%. If a massive crypto rally was one of your predictions for 2023 a year ago, I take my hat off to you. Compare those returns with other asset classes. The NASDAQ is up 36%. The S&P 500 is up 19%. Gold is up 10.7%. If you were long oil or a broad basket of commodities, you are down 10%-12%.

A year ago, many of us thought — I certainly did — that it was game over for crypto and that the naysayers were going to be vindicated.