'Crypto Castle': YouTube Comedy Takes You Back to When Bitcoin Was Just $250

In brief

• New YouTube series “The Crypto Castle” dials back the clock to 2015, when Bitcoin was just $250.
• Viv Ford stars as Viv, who moves into a house full of early Bitcoin adopters.
• The show looks at crypto as a subculture, and how it’s evolved since the early days.

“Crypto culture sucks,” says actor and comedian Viv Ford. “You’ll go to crypto conferences and it’s not what it used to be. It used to be fun degen conferences, and now it’s like, men from JPMorgan talking about leverage or whatever. And you’re, like, what happened?” With her new YouTube sitcom “The Crypto Castle,” Ford’s aiming to break out of “this insane culture bubble” and reset the clock to the days when crypto was full of promise—and Bitcoin cost just $250 a pop. Based on her real-life experience, “The Crypto Castle” stars Ford as Viv, a twentysomething drifting around the fringes of the San Francisco tech boom of the mid-2010s, who fetches up in a shared apartment with four Bitcoin bros.

“There’s no comedic, relatable TV show about this wild world—why is that?” she said. “Why is there no ‘Silicon Valley’ for crypto? Why is there no, like, like ‘New Girl’-adjacent show for crypto?”

As well as Viv, the show features Garrett, the “loudest guy in the room,” would-be nation builder Trent, teenage prodigy Ray, and mysterious Frenchman Pierre, all pursuing their dream to change the world with crypto. In recent years, crypto has typically only popped up in crime movies or been name-checked to add a futuristic gloss to TV shows and films, but Ford’s more interested in “characters that think they are building the future,” she told Decrypt.

“I was really interested in what was the subculture of this thing before it blasted off into the mainstream where everyone could start making money,” she added. Crypto’s evolving subculture The show is a historical snapshot of Bitcoin’s evolution, Ford told Decrypt. “In the title card, we have the Bitcoin price graph, and you see it just kind of shoot up, and then you have the arrow of where you are, and it’s when Bitcoin is low. So the viewer is aware of all of the things that are to come,” including the Bitcoin hard fork, the implosion of Mt. Gox, and the rise of Ethereum. “It’s very much trying to take just those moments of like, will this survive? What does this look like?” And for the Crypto Castle’s residents, their identity is “tied up in this,” she said.  That identity, she argues, is rooted in the idea of subcultures more generally, rather than crypto specifically. “A lot of the people that were in it at the start left, and that’s really interesting,” she said. “I think probably the reason is because these people, actually, they’re less so lovers of crypto and they’re more so lovers of subculture—of finding the thing before the mainstream finds the thing. And so they’re just on a mission to always find that thing.” With the departure of those early pioneers, “there’s a sad evolution of the culture where it just went to, like, ‘How can you make money?’” she lamented. “As this industry tries to mature, tries to be taken more seriously, I’m like, ‘Wait, it’s a joke.’ Can we go back to when it was, like, just this hilarious joke?”