Chess streamer Alexandra Botez made an appearance on Last Week Tonight as a result of a 2022 interview she had with the founder of a cryptocurrency.
Twitch streamers frequently interact with the news media, especially now that many of them are starting to work in the rapidly expanding IT industries. With influencers like Trainwreckz and xQc playing on specific cryptocurrency sites, for instance, Twitch became a center for cryptocurrency marketing, albeit there was significant opposition to streams pushing gambling and crypto. This sparked a ton of conversation on Twitch on the rise of cryptocurrency, which the mainstream media seems to have caught up on.
Because of the market’s lack of security and transparency, comedian John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, has previously attacked the bitcoin industry. The most recent time he brought it up was on his April 23 broadcast, when he talked about the collapse of the industry. Oliver concentrated on Terra, Celsius, and FTX, three of the biggest cryptocurrency businesses to fail recently. When it was time to talk about Terra, the host leaned into a snippet of a conversation between Terra CEO Do Kwon and Alexandra Botez.
In the clip, Botez asks Kwon, “How many of these companies are entering this space just because it’s hot and there’s a lot of funding, versus the ones that will still be here, you know, two to five years later?” Kwon somewhat brazenly answers that “95%” of the newcomers in the crypto space are going to die quickly, then adds, “There’s also entertainment in watching companies die, too.” Of course, as is frequently the case for people featured on Last Week Tonight, Terra’s value fell and Kwon was ultimately imprisoned for fraud, so it turns out that Kwon’s statements were tragically prophetic.
Even though Oliver didn’t specifically mention Botez, it’s strange to see that she was the one who first posed some of these issues to one of the most important figures in the cryptocurrency industry.
