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What Volatility? How Facebook's Historic Loss Became Crypto's Gain
Facebook had a bad day in the market this week – and the crypto community quickly pounced.
By Muyao Shen
Updated Sep 13, 2021, 8:13 a.m. Published Jul 27, 2018, 7:00 p.m.
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July 26 might be forever remembered as one of the darkest days in Facebook's history – or, at the very least, for its shareholders.
An otherwise unassuming Thursday, the day saw the social media giant lose more than $120 billion in market value, the biggest loss in one day for any U.S. traded company. According to Bloomberg, the loss is a direct result of the company's second-quarter report on sales and user growth figures, which fell short of analyst projections, along with months of scandals and criticism regarding data privacy.
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But if the social media giant was already having its worst day ever, crypto advocates were there to make it (maybe) just a little worse.
If you're wondering how Facebook's loss could possibly be associated with cryptocurrency, the answer is simple: it all started with a comparison between the values of bitcoin and Facebook.
Of course, crypto supporters would not let it go as cryptocurrencies have long been criticized for being volatile by traditional market views.
The seemingly tenuous nature of Facebook's stock price led some to draw comparisons with the volatility seen in cryptocurrency markets. As Romain Dillet put it, bitcoin "feels like a stable asset" by comparison.
Interestingly, as many can still recall the feud between Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss brothers from the award-winning movie The Social Network, members in the crypto community also gave a shout-out to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss brothers, who are now among some of the biggest crypto investors as well as co-founders of Gemini, a New York-based cryptocurrency exchange,
In the words of one observer, the reversal of Facebook's market fortunes represented a dose of "sweet revenge."
(The Winklevoss brothers, as CoinDesk reported Thursday, suffered a blow as the SEC once again shot down their bid to have a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) listed.)
Not everyone was buying the Facebook stock and cryptocurrency comparison, however.
Some Twitter users who said they believe that conflating Facebook and cryptocurrency is a meaningless exercise.
As of the time of writing on Friday, Facebook's stock hadn't seen much of a recovery, according to data from Google. Yet the plunge seems to have been arrested, offering, at the very least, a possible reprieve from the crypto-critics.
Facebook image via Shutterstock
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