The crypto market crashed, but they are still buying Bitcoin

Hardcore Bitcoin evangelists are making the case that it differs from other unstable coins

Cory Klippsten started issuing warnings about the cryptocurrency market in March.

The digital coin Luna, Mr Klippsten tweeted, was a scam, run by an entrepreneur with “major Elizabeth Holmes vibes”. The newfangled crypto bank Celsius Network was a “massive blow-up risk”, he said.

When those crypto projects collapsed a few weeks later, causing a crash that has wiped out about US$1 trillion (S$1.38 trillion) in value, Mr Klippsten became a fixture on news shows, where he cast the industry as a morass of hucksters and hypocrites.

“Crypto is a scam,” he declared last month.

But Mr Klippsten differs from most crypto haters in one crucial respect – he runs a Bitcoin company.

In the crypto world, Mr Klippsten is known as a Bitcoin maximalist, or “maxi” — a hardcore evangelist who believes Bitcoin will transform the financial system even as fraud pervades the rest of the crypto ecosystem. The maxis are just a subset of the crypto industry, but their ranks include influential figures like Mr Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter and an early Bitcoin proponent.

The maxis continued buying Bitcoin even after its price plummeted to an 18-month low of about US$20,000 in June. And, as the market has melted, they have embarked on a public relations offensive, aiming to persuade investors and lawmakers that Bitcoin is different from the thousands of other digital currencies that proliferated in the last few years before tanking this spring.