‘I would never date a crypto guy again.’ What women say about dating in Crypto

“I would never date a crypto guy again,” said a New York-based software engineer after she ended a seven-month relationship with the founder of a Web3 startup.

The stereotypical “crypto bro” — defined by Urban Dictionary as “a person with a weak grasp of cryptocurrency applications but strong opinions about the ‘best'” — is known to have committed at least a few of the biblical seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth.

This feature is part of CoinDesk’s The week of sin.

He is the sloth, because the goal is to be rich, not look rich. He’s greedy, because he’s always tweeting about coins going “to the moon.” He’s a gluttonous partygoer in his twenties, always overdoing the open bar. He’s furious, always seemingly capable of starting a fight on Crypto Twitter. Finally, he is proud. Proudly displaying an NFT (non-fungible token) in his studio apartment that he claims is contemporary art, which he loudly bought for six figures when his favorite celebrity quietly changed their profile picture to a cartoon monkey.

Yes, these “sins” can be found in all people in all industries. But why is it so prominent in crypto?

For CoinDesk’s Sin Week, a software engineer, a theater artist and a weathered crypto sis share their experiences dating men in crypto…and how it turned out.

A software engineer in New York met a 23-year-old Ivy League dropout… ahem Web3 startup entrepreneur from the West Coast. She advocated a “casual business meeting.” He thought it was a date. Romance blossomed from there. (For privacy reasons, we do not reveal real names here.)

He was charming and charismatic, and most importantly, investors loved him. But for the software engineer, not so much.

“He was invited to many very exclusive events with potential investors,” she said. But he always traveled alone because these parties always turned up at the last minute. They tended to be in Austin, Texas, Puerto Rico, or Atlanta, and they always happened to be on a yacht.

But he didn’t mind all that travel, she said. These “business trips” were financed by his father, his de facto angel investor. “His dad really wanted him to go back to school and get a corporate job,” she said. “And it created a lot of excitement for them.”

Working a traditional 9-5 job and with almost zero experience in crypto, she couldn’t sympathize with his skewed view of money or the fact that he never had a salary-earning job. And the cherry on top? “He would wear very cheap clothes. He didn’t make an effort,” she said. “And that was it [supposed to be] a power move.”

By the end of the relationship, his company was growing at insane valuations. But he dropped it to start a new one, around the same time the romance died.

“I’m really not interested in ever dating a crypto guy again,” she said.

“I was very frustrated with the ‘be your own boss’ mentality,” she added. She said that being a founder “really changes how you perceive yourself and what you expect from other people … and he carried that into his personal relationships.”

After seven months of dating and many regrets, the software engineer learned something about the crypto men: They pride themselves on achieving more than they actually have and without acknowledging their privileges in life.

The 24-year-old actress/waitress in New York started talking to a guy she met on seeking.com at the height of the pandemic. He immediately asked for her CashApp and she assumed he was a bot.

After receiving $1,500 on CashApp, she met her sugar daddy in New York. He was a married man in his 40s.

The benefits were obvious at first: 10-course tasting menus and $500 cash at the end of each meeting. Then he wanted to give her something better than money – bitcoin.

“I know you don’t know much about this,” he told her, “but I do, and I know this is going to be good for you.”

“To this day, I’m still not quite sure what he did [for a living],” she said, although she remembers many phone calls made to China.

Sugar daddies on seeking.com, the “best site for attractive and successful people,” are particularly interested in sugar babies in creative fields, says the theater artist. “Because a lot of these people have like … dreams that never came true,” she said.

But this sugar daddy was more interested in being her “hotshot mentor”, teaching her about bitcoin and crypto. He wasn’t trying to give her crypto to hide their transactions from his wife, she clarified. “It was like a very fatherly thing,” she said, because her sugar daddy was thinking about investing in her future.

“For people who understand this a little less … I don’t want this imaginary coin,” she said. “I wish [money]and I want it now.”

Finally, he wanted more intimacy than she could provide. She broke it off. And she never received bitcoin.

For the more weathered crypto sis, there’s nothing worse than dating a newly converted crypto bro who talks dollar cost averaging at the top.

The 42-year-old hair and makeup artist made a lot of money trading crypto during the bull market. She lived the dream life on a beach in Puerto Rico, with no capital gains tax.

In 2016, she bought $1,000 worth of bitcoin on Coinbase because her boyfriend at the time “seriously regretted” not investing in crypto early. So she wanted to show him it wasn’t too late.

But “he never participated in the game,” she said. “I took all the risk, and then I had to hear that it was not responsible.”

Finally the guy who thought he missed the boat convinced her to sell at a loss. “It really confused me,” she said. “And then I had to break up with him, because what choice did I have?”

When your view of money doesn’t align with your partner’s, your relationship is doomed, she said.

Fast forward two bull markets later: She made her way to “crypto haven” where it’s full of people focused on the future of fun money.

But the crypto community on the island is so small that you could build a reputation if you had been a “cynical bitch” to someone who only wanted to talk crypto on a date. For example, she refrained from saying “are you sure?” on a date with a bro who had put all his money into a meme coin. “I can basically predict the future of how this person would be in a relationship,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to trust him to be serious.”

But, worst of all, is a crypto newbie preaching about DCAing (Dollar Cost Averaging).

“The non-beginner in me said ‘Oh dear, just wait. You’ll be crying like the rest of us soon,” she said.

She later faced a $100,000 loan from crypto lender Celsius Network that she was unable to repay. And when the entire crypto market began to collapse over the summer, it “paralyzed” her to continue trading.

Fortunately, a hedge fund manager she had met at a crypto meetup was generous enough to help her get out of the loan. He told her to “take the money, exchange it for a couple of years, and then pay me back.”

The makeup artist is now long ethereum, holding ETH tight with the intention of paying the hedge fund guy back.

All of these “sins” seem superficial when you think about the typical crypto bro.

“You see that a lot of people who didn’t have access to certain things now have the opportunity to access it and make full use of it,” said a founder of a dating decentralized autonomous organization that goes by the name v1. “This is a very large depiction of … the superficial display of wealth.”

So what is the actual allure of dating someone in crypto and Web3?

A 2022 eToro survey found that 33% of respondents said they would be inclined to date someone who mentioned crypto in their dating profile (the kind of result you’d expect from a company selling the crypto lifestyle). And only 20% said they would see it as a rejection.

All of these negative traits are more salient “because we’re very flashy about it on social media,” said v1.

So much of Web3 is about abandoning your Web2 identities, and so much of crypto is your online persona, she said. Your opinion is going to have pervasive effects, especially when you blast your views to an entire subsection of the internet known as Crypto Twitter.

But the increasingly digital identity is not necessarily a bad thing. V1 says it can actually make dating safer and more accessible.

“I’m going to sound like a total crypto bro right now,” she quipped. “But attraction is mutual zero knowledge.”

Just as the original ethos of Bitcoin is to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions where the identity of the sender and receiver was not important or necessary, does your age, looks or family background really matter in the modern dating world?

The conference and meeting culture in this industry can make people more forgiving and open-minded, v1 said.

“I can chat or follow this person for five years, but never meet him until a conference in Barcelona, ​​for example. You are willing to understand this person beyond the traditional identity factors and get to know them from their favorite NFT or whatever coin they are shilling that week,” said v1.

“I don’t think there is any industry more accessible than crypto.”