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.

AccessTimeIconJul 27, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. UTC
Updated Aug 18, 2021 at 9:31 p.m. UTC

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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.

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    Of course, crypto supporters would not let it go as cryptocurrencies have long been criticized for being volatile by traditional market views.

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    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.

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    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.)

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    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.

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    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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