Coinbase homepage ad reveals the sad state of the crypto market

If you bought a lot Bitcoin in 2011, you’d be rich now. 

But if you bought Bitcoin a year ago, or even a month ago…well, let’s just say your portfolio would be a pretty sad sight. 

Which is why it’s funny that cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase still has this chart on its webpage. 

The chart, featured quite prominently on Coinbase’s site and noticed recently by Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer, tracks the performance of an imaginary $100 investment in Coinbase Bundle, a sort of fund that tracks the prices of the top 5 cryptocurrencies by market cap, listed on Coinbase: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Ethereum Classic. 

Unfortunately, not one of these coins performed very well in the last week, month or year. 

You could, however, set the chart to “all,” which starts the timeline at Jan. 4, 2013, and turns the imaginary $100 into $12,530.18. But Coinbase Bundle launched in September, so there was no way to buy into it in 2013. 

In any case, kudos to Coinbase for still having the courage to keep that chart online. 

As for Palmer, his comments from January, at the height of the crypto bubble, feel prescient now that the prices have plummeted. 

“While it’s great to see mainstream enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, I think the high valuations and inflated market caps serve more to distract from the real goal of these projects than anything,”  he wrote at the time. “My one hope is that when that does happen and people lose large sums of money, the negativity in the market doesn’t stifle technological innovation or interest in digital currency from the mainstream.”

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.