It was the spring of 2021, and Miami’s hottest night clubs were inundated with phone calls from cryptocurrency entrepreneurs that no one had heard of. They wanted to reserve lots of tables — or rent an entire venue for a whole evening at a cost of half a million dollars or more.

With the price of bitcoin then at $60,000 and crypto becoming mainstream, its biggest beneficiaries descended on the Florida city to flaunt their wealth at lavish parties.

“Out of the blue, all these kids from crypto started coming down and spending a lot of money — like, an insane amount of money,” said Andrea Vimercati, director of food and beverage at Moxy Hotel group.

“They were booking tables for $50,000, and it was like, who the hell are these people,” added Vimercati, former director of Groot Hospitality, which operates some of the hottest night clubs in Miami including Liv, Story and Swan.

The new partygoers were “95 per cent men, young . . . with a kind of nerdy style,” he said. “You couldn’t tell they had a lot of money if they were just walking around.”

A little more than a year later, the phones have stopped ringing after the collapse of Bahamas-based exchange FTX roiled the market and cast a pall over the industry. The crypto revellers frequenting Miami’s clubs have “completely disappeared”, Vimercati said.

Those on the dance floor had behaved as though there was no tomorrow. In the event, it turns out they might have been right. “They wanted to show that they didn’t have any limits,” recalled Vimercati. “They were ordering 12 or 24 bottles of the most expensive champagne and just showering themselves without even drinking.”

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https://www.ft.com/content/68ca53f4-50e1-4607-8b05-a8801d8b1cb5