“The OC” and “Gotham” actor Ben McKenzie has taken on a new role as a cryptocurrency cynic, calling the “supposedly multi-trillion dollar industry” “nothing more than a massive speculative bubble bound to pop.”
“In my opinion, the cryptocurrency industry represents the largest Ponzi scheme in history,” McKenzie said while testifying before the Senate Banking Committee Wednesday in its investigation into the collapse of FTX. “In fact, by the time the dust settles, crypto may well represent a fraud at least 10 times bigger than Madoff.”
McKenzie has been outspoken about his concerns regarding the industry since last year, and he is currently working on co-authoring a book called “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud,” which was acquired by Abrams Press earlier this year.
“I started warning people in October of last year [and] the market peaked in November, so just a month after Jacob Silverman, my colleague and I wrote our first piece warning celebrities about the dangers of endorsing these cryptocurrencies and NFTs and whatnot,” McKenzie told CNN. “Since then the market has lost approximately 70-75% of it’s value — and that’s just the value that’s on paper.”
“Cryptocurrency is this opaque, largely unregulated market, so you can’t even trust that the numbers that you’d see are real, unfortunately,” he added.
For McKenzie, his acting career, launched by his role as Ryan Atwood on “The OC,” and his economics degree from the University of Virginia coalesced into his advocacy work as he warned celebrities and the broader community about the dangers of cryptocurrency.
“I like to say the book I’m writing is about money and lying,” he told CNN. “Now I know about money from my economics degree and from making a little bit of it in 20 years in show biz. But I know about lying because I do it for a living. As an actor you’re aware of what people are doing and how they’re using language, and language is an incredibly important tool that we discount to our peril,” he said, noting that cryptocurrencies are not currencies “by any reasonably economic definition.”
