Alexandra Botez: Chess YouTuber receives spotlight on HBO's 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver'

2023-04-26 16:30

John Oliver directed the interview with Alexandra Botez toward Terra, Celsius, and FTX, the three biggest recent cryptocurrency failures

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: The chess streamer, Alexandra Botez, made an appearance on John Oliver's show 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver' on HBO because of an interview she conducted with the cryptocurrency creator in 2022. It's not something new as YouTube and Twitch streamers frequently appear in mainstream media, especially given that many of them have started to work in industries related to developing technologies.

Influencers like Trainwreckz and xQc, who play on specific cryptocurrency streams, are just two examples of how Twitch has become a hotbed of crypto marketing. However, streams that promote gambling and cryptocurrencies have received a lot of backlash. As a result, Twitch staff members had a lot of conversations about how cryptography was developing, and it appears that these debates were picked up by the mainstream media.

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What was Alexandra Botez's interview about?

During the show, Botez was shown a clip where she was interviewing Kwon Do-Hyung, more commonly known as Do Kwon. Oliver directed the interview toward Terra, Celsius, and FTX, the three biggest recent cryptocurrency failures. During the conversation about Terra, the host played a clip from a conversation between Kwon, the company's founder, and Botez.

In the video, Botez posed a question to Kwon and asked, "How many of these companies are entering this space just because it's hot and there's a lot of funding, compared to the ones that will still be here, you know, two to five years later?" In a rather cheeky response, Kwon stated that "95%" of newcomers to the cryptocurrency space will fail in the early stages itself and added that "watching companies fail is also fun." Thereafter, just like other people featured on 'Last Week Tonight', Kwon's statements proved to be prescient in an ironic way as Terra's value fell and he was ultimately detained due to allegations of a cryptocurrency fraud.

Where did the interview with John Oliver air?

The Bitcoin industry has already been hounded by the comedian, Oliver, due to a lack of market transparency and security. Most recently, he covered the sector's collapse in his broadcast on April 23 on the show's official YouTube channel, LastWeekTonight, and on HBO. The video has received 2.4 million views in just 1 day. Even if Oliver did not personally invite Botez, it is strange to realize that she was the one who raised some of the initial queries with one of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency domain.