Tech

Crypto Trading Platform Says Owning Crypto Will Totally Get You Laid

The survey claims that “nearly three in four would be more interested in a second date with a person who paid the bill in Bitcoin.”
A man cheering at a phone. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

A crypto trading app claims, astoundingly, that it’s found that being into cryptocurrency will get you a date.  

In an article this week covering a survey by trading platform eToro, CNBC writes that “33% of Americans said they would be more likely to go on a date with someone who mentioned crypto assets in their online dating profile.” eToro is a trading app like Robinhood or Webull—you can buy traditional stocks on the app, sure, but cryptocurrencies are a big part of their product. Their tagline, on their website, is ​​"crypto, stocks, and beyond.” 

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According to CNBC, citing eToro: “Nearly three in four would be more interested in a second date with a person who paid the bill in bitcoin.” That sentence could have ended two words sooner, I think, but okay!

The press release by eToro for this survey, which polled 2,000 U.S. residents, claims that “more than 40% of men and 25% of women indicated that their interest in a potential date is stronger when crypto is mentioned.” It also says that “nearly 20% of singles would be more interested in you romantically if you set that NFT as your profile picture on a social platform or dating site.” What the other 80 percent of respondents thought of people changing their Twitter avatars to hexagons to show they overpaid for some bad art is not mentioned in the release.

A trading platform for crypto putting out numbers on how likely you are to get a girlfriend if you’re holding crypto seems a bit like Exxon Mobil solving the climate crisis, but I’ll entertain the idea that for some people (I am not the target market here, admittedly), it could be a draw. A spokesperson for eToro told Motherboard that the survey was commissioned from Appinio, a company that makes market research surveys. Appinio conducted the survey on January 3 and 4, 2022, and participants did not need to be eToro users.

The idea that owning cryptocurrency and NFTs is romantically appealing to anyone outside of the crypto-cultural bubble is already very funny, to me. Nothing says romance like a scabby, rotting cartoon monkey that could get stolen from you at any moment by hackers. But the dirtbag aesthetics, endless scamminess, and rampant privatization of every inch of our digital lives aside, crypto has a long, well-documented history of sexism, even though women are in the space doing notable, worthwhile things. It’s a lot of gatekeeping from guys whose rooms look like this

These days, it seems like a movement that claims to stand for disruption of old systems of power has largely become overrun with people shilling shitcoins and NFTs, including D-list celebrities, corporations, and fraudsters; a long slide into hyper-capitalist nonsense that’s helped along by business news outlets reprinting press releases about how diamond hands will get you laid. It’s gotten so bad that a lot of this stuff is seen as unbearably cringe and undesirable by even hardcore Bitcoiners.  

If you really want to impress a romantic partner this Valentine's Day, Motherboard suggests skipping NFTs of famous artworks that you don’t own, and making a run at the stupid little gold cube that was dumped in Central Park and carted around to Wall Street ghouls by yet another crypto clown show.