Miami Nightclub owners are feeling the pinch as crypto-investors scale back their spending due to the recent FTX crash and the wider music market decline.
The Financial Times reported that the high-spending crypto-enthusiasts who used to rent out entire venues for a night have now all but disappeared. Andrea Vimercati, Head of Food and Beverage for the Moxy Hotel group, noted that “Out of the blue, all these cryptocurrency guys started going down and spending a lot of money, like an unbelievable amount of money. They were reserving tables for $50,000, and it was like, who the hell are these people?”
At the time, the flagship cryptocurrency was trading around $60,000 and Ethereum was nearly $4,000. However, following the collapse of FTX and subsequent fall in crypto prices, Bitcoin has dropped below $16,000 – a decline of over 75%. This has been keenly felt in nightclubs, with Vimercati noting that the crypto-boys, “95 percent men, young. . . with a kind of nerdy style”, have “completely disappeared”.
E11even, a popular Miami nightclub that began accepting cryptocurrency payments in April 2021, processed over $6 million in transactions last fiscal year but only $10,000 in the past three months. The crypto-rich boys would spend their money not just on nightclubs, but also on luxury items such as big houses and yachts; Brett Harris, Executive Director of Luxury Sales at Douglas Elliman, noted that “They bought big houses for $25 million and rented big yachts. . . they had money and they were spending it lavishly. They were buying big houses for cash, with no financing, turning Bitcoin into cash to buy.”
Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO and founder of the crashed crypto exchange FTX, recently revealed he has around $100,000 in his bank account – a far cry from his wealth which peaked at $26.5 billion last year.
