They called it liberation. They called it the great equalizer, the democratization of finance, the end of gatekeeping, the tool that would finally let Black people build wealth outside the system that had spent four centuries denying them access. The pitch was seductive because it was built on a truth: the American financial system has been hostile to Black people for its entire existence, and any technology that promised to bypass that system was going to find a receptive audience in the community most harmed by it. And so Black America embraced cryptocurrency with an enthusiasm that outpaced every other demographic in the country — not out of greed, not out of foolishness, but out of a hunger for financial autonomy so deep and so justified that it made the risks invisible. By the time the losses were counted — the collapsed exchanges, the worthless tokens, the NFTs that turned to dust, the savings accounts emptied into platforms that existed only long enough to collect deposits — the bill was measured in billions, and the people who paid it were the ones who could least afford to.
The Pew Research Center found that in 2021, at the height of the cryptocurrency mania, approximately 18% of Black Americans reported having invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrency — compared to 15% of white Americans. The Ariel-Schwab Black Investor Survey, the longest-running study of Black investment behavior, found that Black investors under 40 were significantly more likely to own cryptocurrency than stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. For a generation of young Black Americans, crypto was not a supplement to traditional investing. It was a replacement — the first and often only investment vehicle they had ever used.
The Promise and the Pitch
The cryptocurrency industry’s marketing to Black communities was not accidental. It was strategic, targeted, and built on a sophisticated understanding of the specific pain points that would make the pitch most effective. The messaging centered on three themes that resonated deeply with Black economic experience: distrust of banks, exclusion from traditional wealth building, and the possibility of rapid wealth accumulation without the credentials, credit scores, and institutional access that the traditional financial system demands.
The distrust was earned. As documented throughout the history of Black banking, from the Freedman’s Bank collapse to the subprime mortgage crisis, Black communities have experienced institutional financial betrayal at every turn. When a crypto promoter says “you don’t need a bank,” that is not just a sales pitch. It is an acknowledgment of a hundred years of pain. When an influencer says “decentralized finance means no one can deny you a loan because of your zip code,” that lands differently in a community where redlining is not a historical concept but a lived memory. The pitch worked because the wound was real.
The exclusion was real too. The Ariel-Schwab survey has consistently found that Black households are significantly less likely to own stocks than white households at every income level. The median Black family has approximately $24,000 in retirement savings compared to $171,000 for white families. When traditional investment feels inaccessible — culturally, educationally, and financially — a $50 Bitcoin purchase on a smartphone app feels like a door opening for the first time. You do not need a brokerage account, a financial advisor, a minimum balance, or a credit check. You need a phone and fifty dollars. And the promise — endlessly repeated on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter — was that fifty dollars could become five thousand, could become fifty thousand, could become freedom.
“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
The Influencer Machine
The cryptocurrency industry deployed a targeted influencer strategy aimed at Black audiences that was as calculated as any tobacco or alcohol campaign that preceded it. Prominent Black entertainers, athletes, and social media personalities were paid to promote specific tokens, exchanges, and NFT projects to their followers. Some disclosed the payments. Many did not. The Federal Trade Commission has documented that cryptocurrency was the single largest category of social media advertising fraud between 2021 and 2023, and that influencer-promoted crypto scams disproportionately targeted younger audiences and communities of color.
The FTX exchange, before its spectacular collapse in November 2022, pursued a deliberate strategy of Black celebrity endorsement. Its advertisements featured prominent athletes and entertainers. Its partnerships with sports leagues placed its brand in front of millions of Black viewers. When FTX collapsed, revealing that customer deposits had been misappropriated by founder Sam Bankman-Fried to fund speculative trading, personal real estate purchases, and political donations, the customers who lost their money included a disproportionate share of first-time investors from communities that had been specifically targeted by the company’s marketing.
The influencer campaigns extended beyond exchanges to individual tokens and NFT projects. Social media feeds in Black digital spaces were saturated with promotions for tokens that had no underlying value, no utility, no development team, and no future — nothing, in fact, except a marketing budget and an influencer willing to promote them. Many of these tokens were classic pump-and-dump schemes: the promoters bought early, the influencer campaign drove up the price, the promoters sold, and the followers who bought on the recommendation were left holding worthless digital assets.
The NFT Catastrophe
The NFT — non-fungible token — craze hit Black communities with particular force, in part because it was marketed as the democratization of art and culture, two domains where Black creativity has always been abundant and Black ownership has always been scarce. The pitch was irresistible: Black artists could mint their work as NFTs, sell directly to collectors without galleries or agents taking a cut, and build wealth from their own creativity. Black collectors could own digital art, profile pictures, and cultural artifacts that signified membership in a community. It felt revolutionary. It felt Black.
The reality was a speculative bubble that evaporated billions in value. According to data from NFT tracking platforms, the average NFT purchased in 2021 and 2022 had lost more than 90% of its value by 2024. High-profile projects marketed specifically to Black audiences — including projects endorsed by Black celebrities and themed around Black culture — were among the hardest hit. Collectors who spent thousands on profile picture NFTs, convinced they were building digital wealth, found themselves holding assets that could not be sold at any price.
The artists who were supposed to benefit fared only slightly better. While a small number of Black digital artists achieved significant sales — including some who earned more from NFTs than they had in their entire prior careers — the vast majority found that the market rewarded hype over quality, connections over creativity, and early entry over artistic merit. By the time most Black artists entered the NFT space, the speculative fervor that had driven sales was already cooling, and the collectors who remained were concentrated in a small number of blue-chip projects that had been established before the mainstream adoption wave.
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Decentralized finance — DeFi — was marketed as the ultimate liberation technology: a financial system with no banks, no brokers, no gatekeepers, and no discrimination. You could lend, borrow, earn interest, and trade entirely through software, with no human intermediary to deny you based on your name, your neighborhood, or your skin color. For Black Americans who had experienced every form of financial discrimination the system could produce, DeFi sounded like salvation.
The reality was a largely unregulated casino in which unsophisticated investors were matched against professional traders, algorithmic strategies, and outright fraudsters in an environment with no consumer protections, no deposit insurance, no recourse for losses, and no one to call when something went wrong. The total value locked in DeFi protocols peaked at approximately $180 billion in late 2021. By 2023, it had fallen below $40 billion, with hundreds of protocols having collapsed, been hacked, or simply shut down with customer funds.
Black investors who deposited savings into high-yield DeFi protocols — attracted by interest rates of 10%, 20%, even 100% that were mathematically unsustainable — lost their principal when the protocols failed. The Terra/Luna collapse alone wiped out approximately $60 billion in value in a matter of days, affecting investors worldwide but hitting hardest in communities that had allocated savings they could not afford to lose. The Celsius Network, which marketed itself as an alternative to traditional banking and attracted deposits by offering interest rates far above market, froze customer withdrawals in June 2022 and filed for bankruptcy the following month. Its customers, many of them first-time investors seeking a better return than their bank offered, lost billions.
The Real Numbers
Precise figures for cryptocurrency losses by race are difficult to establish because most exchanges and platforms do not collect or publish demographic data. However, the FTC reported that Americans lost at least $3.8 billion to cryptocurrency fraud between 2021 and 2023, and that the median individual loss was approximately $2,600. Given that Black Americans adopted crypto at higher rates, held crypto as a larger proportion of their investment portfolio, and were specifically targeted by influencer marketing campaigns, a conservative estimate places the share of losses borne by Black investors at well over $1 billion — and potentially several times that figure when non-fraudulent losses from market declines are included.
The Ariel-Schwab survey provides a window into the magnitude. Among Black investors under 40, cryptocurrency ownership exceeded stock ownership. If the average crypto-holding Black household invested between $2,000 and $5,000 — consistent with survey data on crypto investment amounts by income bracket — and the market decline from peak to trough represented a loss of 60 to 80 percent, the aggregate losses across millions of Black crypto holders reach into the billions. These are not losses that can be absorbed by a community where the median household net worth is approximately $24,000. For many Black investors, their crypto loss was the majority of their savings.
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
What Was Really Being Sold
The tragedy of Black America’s crypto experience is not that people made bad investments. People in every demographic made bad investments during the crypto bubble. The tragedy is that the hunger for financial liberation — a hunger born of four centuries of exclusion — was exploited by an industry that understood the pain and monetized it. The crypto industry did not create the distrust of banks that made its pitch effective. It did not create the wealth gap that made the promise of rapid returns irresistible. It did not create the financial exclusion that made “no credit check, no minimum balance” sound like freedom. It simply recognized these conditions and built a marketing machine designed to convert them into deposits.
And when the deposits were lost, the industry moved on. The exchanges closed. The influencers deleted their promotional posts. The token founders disappeared. And the families who had converted their savings — their real, hard-earned, desperately needed savings — into digital tokens that now exist only as entries on a blockchain that no one will ever read were left with nothing. No deposit insurance. No recourse. No refund. Just the particular emptiness of having trusted a promise that was designed to be broken.
What Financial Liberation Actually Requires
The path to financial liberation for Black America does not run through any speculative asset class. It never has. It runs through the unglamorous, unsexy, profoundly effective mechanisms that have built wealth for every community that has ever built it: earning, saving, investing in proven assets, and doing so consistently over decades. These are not exciting words. They do not fit on a billboard or a TikTok. They cannot be marketed by an influencer or endorsed by a celebrity. But they work, and they have always worked, and no cryptocurrency, no NFT, no DeFi protocol, and no digital token has ever or will ever replace them.
The data is unambiguous. The FINRA Foundation has documented that investors who maintain a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate over a twenty-year period have historically achieved positive returns in every such period since modern markets began. The S&P 500 has returned an average of approximately 10% per year over its history. A Black family that invested $200 per month in a broad market index fund starting at age 25 would have approximately $500,000 by age 60 — half a million dollars, built without speculation, without risk of total loss, without trusting an anonymous protocol or an influencer with a financial incentive to mislead.
Financial literacy is the first requirement. Not the superficial financial literacy of knowing what a 401(k) is, but the deep financial literacy of understanding compound interest, risk diversification, the difference between an asset and a speculation, and the iron law that any investment promising returns significantly above the market average is either taking risks that are not disclosed or committing fraud. This literacy must be taught in Black schools, Black churches, Black barbershops, Black social media, and Black homes with the same urgency and cultural investment that is currently devoted to entertainment, sports, and politics.
Ownership is the second requirement. Not ownership of tokens that exist only on a screen, but ownership of businesses that produce goods and services, real estate that generates income, and financial institutions that serve the community. The wealth of every prosperous community in history has been built on tangible assets: land, businesses, and banks. Black America needs more of all three, and the capital that was lost in the crypto bubble — the billions that evaporated into worthless tokens and collapsed exchanges — is a measure of how much investment in tangible assets was foregone in pursuit of a digital mirage.
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Take the Real World IQ Test →Patience is the third requirement, and it is the hardest, because patience is the antithesis of everything the crypto industry sold. Compound interest works slowly. A diversified portfolio grows gradually. Generational wealth is built over generations, not overnight. There are no shortcuts, and every shortcut that is offered is either a lie or a transfer of risk from the person selling it to the person buying it. The families that built wealth — in every community, in every country, in every era of human history — built it by earning more than they spent, investing the difference in productive assets, and giving those assets time to grow. That is not a revolutionary insight. It is the oldest truth in economics. And it is the truth that was obscured, deliberately and profitably, by an industry that sold Black America a fantasy of instant liberation and delivered the reality of instant loss.
We have been here before. Every generation, a new vehicle arrives promising Black America a shortcut to the wealth that has been denied through every legitimate channel. And every generation, the shortcut turns out to be a toll road that charges more than it delivers. The lottery promised wealth through luck. Crypto promised wealth through technology. Neither delivered, and both extracted. The only path that has ever worked is the path that requires no luck and no technology — only discipline, knowledge, patience, and the refusal to let anyone, ever again, convince us that there is a faster way. There is not. There never has been. And the sooner we stop looking for one, the sooner we can start building the real thing.