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From New Yorker

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“We are really working day and night” to figure out long Covid, one researcher said.

Even as the number of new Covid-19 cases in the US is dropping, hundreds of thousands of Americans are still testing positive every day. More than 28 million new cases have been reported since Omicron emerged in the US just two months ago, and the variant now drives 99.9 percent of cases, as of January 22, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thanks to vaccines, boosters, and increasingly available treatments, most people who get infected today won’t end up in the hospital or die. A big question, however, looms over the survivors: What about long Covid?

Long Covid is a condition that arises after acute infection and often includes shortness of breath, fatigue, and “brain fog” but can also involve a wide range of debilitating problems in the heart, brain, lungs, gut, and other organs. According to the World Health Organization’s working definition, long Covid usually occurs three months after symptomatic Covid-19 begins and lasts for at least two months. Sometimes, the symptoms just never go away after the initial infection. Occasionally, they appear months after recovery or after an asymptomatic case. This means that if you’ve recovered from Covid-19, you’re not necessarily in the clear.

No one knows exactly how many people have or had long Covid. Estimates so far are “wildly disparate” in part because researchers define the condition differently and because the people seeking care may only be a small portion of those affected, said Nahid Bhadelia, an associate professor at Boston University School of Medicine. Studies on the conservative end have found that 10 to 20 percent of Covid-19 survivors get long Covid, while others report 50 percent.

Scientists have proposed numerous hypotheses to explain long Covid’s myriad symptoms since research began in earnest after the first wave of cases in 2020. Early suspects included a weakened immune system, widespread inflammation, and even low sex hormone levels.

There are no firm answers yet, but there’s now greater consensus among researchers about the two leading theories and the ways they may be connected. Scientists also have a better understanding of the people who are susceptible to long Covid.

While many used to think that the condition only affected people with severe illness, patients now range from teens to older adults, some of whom had only mild or even asymptomatic illness, said Kathleen Bell, a professor in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at UT Southwestern Medical Center, on a recent press call. Early research is pointing to factors that may raise a person’s risk of long Covid, such as low levels of certain antibodies, reactivated viruses in the bloodstream, and existing conditions such as diabetes or asthma.

Amid pressure from patients and concerns that the vast numbers of omicron infections might drive a new wave of long Covid, researchers around the world are racing to understand what causes the condition and how it might be diagnosed and treated. “We are really working day and night,” Resia Pretorius, a professor of physiological sciences at Stellenbosch University in South Africa whose research is explaining the role of blood clots in long Covid, told me.

It’s too early to predict an omicron wave of long Covid, but scientists are cautious

Scientists I spoke to agreed that it’s too early to know whether omicron will lead to a new wave of long Covid because less than three months have passed since the variant emerged. But David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, is erring on the side of caution. “Right now, we have no reason to think any differently about long Covid.”

Whether different variants change the likelihood of developing long Covid is a fundamental question among researchers, Michael Peluso, an infectious diseases doctor who co-leads a long Covid research effort at the University of California San Francisco, told me. Severe initial Covid-19 infection, he noted, tends to correlate with who is at risk, so “it’s encouraging that early data suggest that omicron might be less severe, but obviously not enough time has passed.”

Still, long Covid can develop after mild or even asymptomatic Covid-19, too. “If you say omicron’s mild, it doesn’t say anything about long Covid,” Amy Proal, a microbiologist at PolyBio Institute, told me. “We don’t even know how mild omicron is.” The WHO has pushed back against calling omicron “mild,” but it seems to result in less severe illness, especially among the vaccinated. This may be because it’s better at evading the immune system, which isn’t a good thing because it raises the possibility that the virus is remaining in the body, Proal added.

Even if long Covid turns out to be less common among people who have been infected with omicron, the sheer number of cases right now means that millions may still develop the condition. “Even if it’s rare,” said Peluso, “it will affect a lot of people.”

“We’re worried,” said Proal. “It’s not being communicated to the public as one of the things to take into consideration in how to live these days. Not as much as it should be.”

Vaccination appears to offer some protection against long Covid, but it’s not clear how much. It certainly helps by preventing serious illness in the first place, and it may help clear the virus before it can lodge in the body for the long term. It also spurs the immune system to specifically target the virus, rather than raise defenses throughout the whole body, which could cause collateral damage elsewhere.

Amy Osborne/AFP via Getty Images
People stand in line at the mass vaccination site at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, on February 5, 2021.

An encouraging recent preprint from Israel shows that fully vaccinated people who had breakthrough Covid-19 between March 2020 and November 2021 report fewer long Covid symptoms than unvaccinated people who were infected, suggesting “that some ability to fight off the virus is helpful for long Covid as it is for acute Covid,” Leora Horwitz, director for the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Delivery Science at NYU Langone Health, told me.

The immune system likely plays a leading role in long Covid

The sheer range of symptoms reported by people with long Covid — more than 200 across 10 groups of organ systems, according to one patient-led survey — makes uncovering their biological origins a gargantuan task. There are likely several subtypes of long Covid, each with its own cluster of symptoms and cause. “We’re not talking about a monolithic, single entity,” said Horwitz.

Scientists have proposed many explanations for long Covid, but several I spoke to agreed that there are now two leading theories: that symptoms are driven by the immune system or by the persistence of the virus in the body. Importantly, these aren’t mutually exclusive, and it’s likely that both factors are at play and interconnected, together with a number of other mechanisms.

The immune theory suggests that Covid-19 turns the immune system against the body. This could explain symptoms like racing heart, dizziness, weakness, and microclots in the blood, said Putrino, whose research focuses on the former. A large proportion of his long Covid patients seem to have dysautonomia, a condition that interferes with processes like balance, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and digestion. With Yale University immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, Putrino is studying the blood of long-haulers for evidence of an abnormal immune response that might be throwing the autonomic nervous system off track.

Flurries of microclots — tiny blood clots — observed in the blood of people with acute and long Covid may be fueling the immune system’s reaction. Clots in healthy people usually break down easily, but those in people with long Covid resist digestion and continue to drift throughout the circulation. Pretorius’s team has discovered inflammatory molecules concealed inside these microclots that she thinks may spur the production of autoantibodies. Having clots in circulation can cause the whole vascular system to become inflamed, ultimately choking off the supply of oxygen to cells and leading to a range of issues throughout the body. “Many of the symptoms that are related to long Covid can actually be traced back to a general oxygen deprivation state,” she said.

One of the primary functions of the immune system is to keep pathogens in line — including those that live inside our bodies, like dormant viruses and normally benign gut bacteria. When it isn’t working properly, these pathogens can act up and cause illness. “Patients might clear [SARS- CoV-2] itself from tissue, but immune dysregulation might allow other viruses and pathogens to reactivate and then drive chronic systems,” said Proal. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, seems to be reactivated in people with Covid-19, and scientists are studying whether the herpes viruses and the common parasite Toxoplasma do the same.

It’s possible, too, that the reactivation of these pathogens contributes to autoimmunity. Research recently published in Science posited that prior infection with the Epstein-Barr virus drives multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease, by spurring production of autoantibodies. Proal suggested that a similar mechanism could be at play in long Covid. “What it really means is that overall, autoantibodies can be generated as part of the immune system response to infection,” she said.

Lingering virus may also be to blame

Proal is also investigating theories linked to viral persistence, the other overarching long Covid theory. The virus can remain in the body and brain long after acute infection, and its genetic material can persist up to 230 days after symptoms arise, as a recent National Institutes of Health preprint found. Lingering virus is often found not in the blood but in the tissues, an important consideration for researchers studying and developing diagnostic tools for long Covid, Proal and others emphasized.

It’s not fully understood what these so-called “viral reservoirs” do in the body. Proal’s previous work on myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), an illness that has substantial similarity with long Covid, suggests that persistent virus — Epstein-Barr virus, in the case of ME/CFS — can wreak havoc on the body long after acute infection.

In long Covid, viral reservoirs could continue to injure tissues directly. They may leak viral proteins into the bloodstream, where they can spur the formation of the aforementioned microclots and activate the immune system, leading to inflammation and further damage. Or they may do nothing at all.

One theory is that inflammation in tissues caused by persistent virus can trigger inflammation in the brain via the far-reaching vagus nerve, which runs the length of the spine and connects to the brainstem. A recent preprint from a team co-led by Yale’s Iwasaki showed that mice with mild Covid-19 had activated brain microglia cells and higher levels of some inflammatory molecules. One of those molecules has been observed at high levels in the brains of long-haulers experiencing cognitive issues like brain fog. “You can start to see a scope of connected symptoms that can really make someone ill,” said Proal.

Like the symptoms of long Covid, the research is all over the place. “It’s a mess — anyone who says they get it is lying,” said Putrino. But patterns in the data are steadily emerging, which many of the researchers I spoke to attributed to collaboration among long Covid research teams and patient advocacy groups. Organizations like the Long Covid Alliance and Survivor Corps have been instrumental in helping recruit participants and lobby for much-needed funding since research on the condition began, they said.

Recent research identifying the people who are most at risk is especially promising. A small study recently published in Cell named four factors that may put people at higher risk for long Covid: higher levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the blood in the early stages of infection, Type 2 diabetes, reactivated Epstein-Barr virus (which infects over 90 percent of the global population), and the presence of certain autoantibodies — which target the body’s own cells as if they were intruders. Other risk factors could include low levels of antibodies called IgM and IgG3 and preexisting asthma, as a recent study in Nature Communications suggested. Bell cautioned, however, that such factors are for “research purposes only” and shouldn’t be viewed as metrics for diagnosis.

Fortunately, many researchers studying the basic science of long Covid already have treatment — and diagnosis — in mind. Putrino said that 70 to 80 percent of his patients respond well to intensive autonomic rehabilitation therapy, which involves coaching to improve breathing followed by physical exercises. With RECOVER, an NIH-funded nationwide study on long Covid, Horwitz is developing a list of medications and vaccines to test and put through clinical trials.

“I am quite optimistic that there will be things that will be helpful,” she said. Pretorius is developing a diagnostic tool for long Covid, and she’s trying to get funding for a clinical trial involving clot-busting drugs. “We’re not going to rest,” she said.

Yasmin Tayag is a science editor and writer. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Guardian, and she was previously the lead editor of the Medium Coronavirus Blog.

A seven-day rolling average of Covid-19 cases in South Africa.

“[T]he shape of a spike then decline is what we generally expect in a single population,” said Justin Lessler, a professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, in an email.

A key variable is the basic reproductive number of the virus, or R0, which is the average number of people that one infected individual tends to infect. “If that number is above one, the epidemic grows exponentially; if it is below one, it declines exponentially,” Lessler said.

As more people get infected with a coronavirus variant, there are fewer people left to infect. When the basic reproductive number falls below one, new infections reach their peak and then decline. To plateau, the rate of new infections has to stabilize somewhere near one, but that would require an unusual set of conditions, according to Lessler.

The idea that disease outbreaks are generally symmetrical is an old one. William Farr observed in the 1840s that smallpox epidemics followed a mathematical pattern, though his formula, known as Farr’s law, resulted in a bell-shaped curve. But diseases rarely follow such neat curves.

“That has been generally discredited as a ‘law’ since it doesn’t allow for things like changes in susceptibility due to different levels of immunity/immune waning, movement in and out of populations, and changes to risk and exposure behaviors,” said Murray.

That’s been evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some countries like South Korea saw more gentle hills as different variants took root, while others like Brazil experienced asymmetrical, jagged peaks throughout the pandemic. Some of that is due to delays in identifying and reporting cases. In some places, variants like delta and omicron overlapped. At the country level, case curves can change shape as the pandemic spreads over time from urban to rural areas or can peak at different times depending on the region.

Then one has to account for public health interventions. Vaccines offer significant immune protection (and recovery from Covid-19 can be protective too). Measures like wearing face masks, limiting public gatherings, more rigorous testing, and boosting vaccination efforts also assist in “flattening the curve” and help waves to crest. People also change their behavior in response to rising infections. In the US, surges in vaccination and testing followed spikes in cases.

“That increase in testing and implementation of public health interventions helps us not only reduce transmission, but also more accurately and timely identify dips in cases,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, in an email. “These are also good examples of how effective the vaccines have been and our ability to rapidly respond to spikes and novel variants.”

So both the shape and the size of an infection spike can be altered with public health tactics. Over time, as immunity builds up in the population, experts expect to stop seeing tall, sharp spikes in Covid-19 cases. The virus probably won’t go away entirely, but case counts could form seasonal waves as new variants arise, immunity wanes, and exposure opportunities increase, according to Mokdad.

Omicron cases are poised to drop further, but only if we remain vigilant

Covid-19 cases spurred by omicron appear to have peaked already in the US, but the health care system is still facing a stressful time ahead.

When an outbreak peaks in a given community, “50 percent of the infections have occurred and now another 50 will happen as we come down,” Mokdad said. “So we still have a couple of weeks ahead of us that are dangerous in the United States. … A small fraction of them are going to the hospitals, but a small fraction of a huge number is a lot.”

If public health measures like masking and social distancing are relaxed too soon, cases can bounce back up on their way down. The UK, for instance, reopened schools and relaxed Covid-19 rules before the omicron wave flattened out. Then infections stopped dropping.

Chart showing Covid-19 cases in the UK Our World in Data
The omicron wave in the UK peaked in early January but saw a bump on its way down as the country relaxed some of its restrictions.

The same thing could happen to other countries. “That sharp decline will slow down at one point, then it goes back [down] sharply again,” Mokdad said. “That’s what we are noticing globally.”

Even after the omicron wave recedes, the US will still have to contend with people who remain unvaccinated against Covid-19, both inside the country and around the world. And the virus is always changing: Omicron now has a subvariant called BA.2 that is gaining some ground, though it’s not yet clear what it means for the pandemic overall.

The more the virus spreads, the more likely it is to mutate in dangerous ways. As the current variants have shown, they can quickly spread around the world, regardless of where they originate.

The recurring spikes of Covid-19 cases, fueled in part by variants, should inspire us to redouble our efforts at controlling the disease, especially with vaccines. “We’re still struggling to avoid these peaks as vigilant infection prevention efforts and global vaccine equity have been a challenge,” said Popescu.

A more robust global vaccination effort, coupled with better disease surveillance to catch variants before they spell trouble, could prevent the next wave and finally start to bring the pandemic under control.

The stars of The Bachelor want to sell you some NFTs.

Colton Underwood has worn many hats during his media career — Bachelorette contestant, Bachelor in Paradise contestant, first virgin Bachelor lead, first gay Bachelor lead, Netflix reality show person, and now … NFT guy.

In January, the athlete-turned-reality-star-turned-influencer launched a project called Pocket Friends, a collection of NFT cartoon character animals, such as Sonya the duck and Betty the hamster. The friends, each of which is supposed to represent a “childhood struggle,” will live on the ethereum blockchain. Each character is supposed to appear in a book, and with 13,000 characters planned, that sounds like a lot of books.

People can’t get the NFTs yet, but if and when they are able, they’re promised access to a “variety of benefits,” including a writers room — presumably for those many books — voting (it’s not clear on what), and “special access to events and celebrities.” For now, they can hang out with the Pocket Friends team, including Colton, on Discord. On Discord, participants are encouraged to invite as many others as they can to earn a spot on the “whitelist,” a sort of VIP list, and take part in a Twitter meme challenge to help Pocket Friends get followers. It’s all about building the community — and getting in early.

Underwood, 30, is hardly unique in his attempt to use his semi-celebrity to try to hop onto the crypto train and parlay his social media following into buzz around some sort of NFT project. He’s not the only member of the Bachelor franchise, which shot him into fame, to do so, either.

Former Bachelor star Matt James has taken a head-first dive into crypto, as evidenced by his Instagram profile with the laser eyes. Another former lead, Peter Weber, is trying to sell some sort of NFT playing cards of himself. Jade Roper Tolbert, who was with her husband one of the first franchise couples to really monetize their influencer status, is doing a lady-friendly NFT project called Sacred Skulls.

Nobody is on The Bachelor for the right reasons anymore, if they ever were. Most are there to be influencers and get Instagram followers, and there’s a bustling economy around being a Bachelor Nation member.

“It’s nothing new that celebrities bring dubious products to market or are spokespeople for things that seem a little shady or questionable. With influencers, the difference is that sense of intimacy and authenticity that comes from a place like social media,” said Erin Meyers, an associate professor of communication at Oakland University.

Bachelor stars are normie influencers who will often try basically anything for money. They’re also excellent promoters — and not particularly discerning ones. These are qualities that crypto and NFTs, still in their early phases, really need. User acquisition is key for making these social constructs something real — the pool of believers has to constantly expand for it to work.

Investors in the space are moving fast, and it’s a great fit for people who were built to shill. They are accustomed to pushing something even when there’s no there there — like the narrative that 30 men or women are going to all fall in love with a single suitor on live TV, or, as influencers, that their audiences are getting a full picture of their real, authentic lives.

You don’t know Colton, but you feel like you do. That gives him and others an avenue to you that more traditional advertisers maybe wouldn’t have — a path to get you to buy Calvin the chameleon, his new friend. Who is the child who wants one of Colton’s NFTs? It’s unclear.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Colton Underwood (@coltonunderwood)

Would you like an NFT with this rose?

The first rule of being on The Bachelor: The best-case scenario is generally to not win The Bachelor, but to come semi-close. The second rule is you’re not supposed to say the first rule. If you do, everybody gets mad at you for admitting you’d much rather be the next lead or get more Instagram followers, both more lucrative situations if the goal is to join the creator economy.

“You get more out of it if you don’t win, honestly, because it opens up avenues for you to do all of these influencer-type deals,” Meyers said.

“The contestants that come off the show that are in the top five, top three, typically come off with a very big following and an extremely engaged following,” said Ali Grant, the founder of Be Social, a communications agency focused on influencers. “It really matters what they do after that. A lot of them either do not much with the following and go back to regular life, or say, ‘Hey, I’m going to be an influencer, I’m going to monetize my social,’ and really make this a longstanding career.”

Plenty of former contestants have taken that route, to varying degrees of success. As business and media trends change, so does what Bachelor Nation is trying to sell — hence the entrance of crypto.

Matt James, the first Black lead of The Bachelor, now that his season is over, has fashioned himself as a bit of a crypto connoisseur. In May 2021, a crypto company called BlockFi announced a partnership with James, saying he would participate in educational videos, collaboration events, and “other social media activities” as part of the deal. At the very least, they got some tweets out of the arrangement, with James ordering a pizza at one point with a BlockFi credit card.

THE WAIT IS OVER - my @BlockFi credit card allows me to earn #Bitcoin with every purchase! Pizza on me tonight, send me address & what toppings you want pic.twitter.com/9R775RL9KQ

— Matt James (@mattjames919) July 12, 2021

James often talks crypto in interviews and tweets about bitcoin and NFTs. When cryptocurrency prices dropped in late January, James, like a lot of crypto bros, tweeted through it.

Unfazed ‍ #BTC pic.twitter.com/74ewEx5SNL

— Matt James (@mattjames919) January 21, 2022

In public, he fashions himself as both a student and an expert in the space. It also appears that ABC Food Tours, a kid-focused nonprofit James and fellow Bachelor alum Tyler Cameron run, has been slightly refashioned to fold in crypto.

The organization rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq in early January, and James in an Instagram post at the time said its 2022 goal would be financial literacy — with a crypto twist. “Expect a wave of digital wallets being created and 50 percent of our education with students to take place in the Metaverse,” he wrote.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Matt James (@mattjames919)

Jade Roper Tolbert gained much of her Bachelor-related fame after appearing in the spinoff Bachelor in Paradise, where she met her now-husband, Tanner Tolbert. Now she is dabbling in the NFT space. She’s the co-founder of Sacred Skulls, a women-led NFT project where the art is, as the name suggests, skulls. Her co-founder, Kayla Lane, is married to former Bachelorette contestant JJ Lane.

Like some other women-led projects in the crypto space, it coopts boss-babe, female empowerment language. Sacred Skulls says it is “empowering women through financial independence” and aims to fill in the gender gap in NFTs. “Having a huge following of women, Kayla and I were just like, ‘We want to empower women in this space, we want to give them financial freedom,” Roper Tolbert said in an interview with Vox. Lane emphasized that they want to make sure “there’s an opportunity for women to have a seat at the NFT table.”

The pair said they don’t think their status as influencers — particularly on Instagram — gave them much of a leg up in their NFT endeavors. “A lot of people who follow me don’t even know what NFT stands for,” Roper Tolbert said. While Sacred Skulls appears from time to time in her Instagram stories, she doesn’t post about it there the way she does on Twitter. “This isn’t influencing, I’m not shilling a product for people to buy. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, go use this toothbrush,’” she said. “It’s more that this is an opportunity for people to get into, more women need to be in here before it gets completely taken over.”

Ahhh sending the love right back, @QueerFriendsNft!! ✨✨A great group of amazing projects, too! https://t.co/oo3zZasfvR

— Jade Roper Tolbert (@jadelizroper) January 20, 2022

‼️Don’t miss out on this Women Led NFT drop! We opened up more WL Pre-Sale spots to join. Minting next week… ‼️

How to enter:
1. Join our discord (link in twitter bio)
2.Fill out our Pre-Sale WL form, (directions in the Pre-Sale channel on discord) pic.twitter.com/XP8uEkWWaJ

— Sacred Skulls: SOLD OUT (@sacred_skulls) January 21, 2022

Jade and Tanner, who met on the Bachelor spinoff series in 2015, were among the first in the franchise to capitalize on the influencer game. In 2016, Us magazine ran a story about them making a combined $1 million for their sponsored posts. The pair have also raised eyebrows with their activities. In 2020, Roper Tolbert was stripped of a $1 million prize she’d won playing fantasy football after allegedly cheating.

Peter Weber, another former Bachelor lead, is selling collectible playing cards of himself on a platform called Gildable that sells “collectible NFT cards by cultural icons.” As of this writing, he’s sold 86 out of the 100 packs available.

There’s nothing especially wrong with Bachelor alumni getting into crypto or into NFTs. Plenty of people are dabbling in the space right now, including high-profile, mid-profile, and low-profile celebrities. The projects they’re working on aren’t particularly notable.

“You hear they’re getting into NFTs, you tend to assume it’s going to be one of the more dubious projects,” said Matt Stephenson, a PhD candidate at Columbia University who researches behavioral economics and NFTs. He added that influencers finding success in NFTs is probably the “least interesting thing” that NFTs can do.

NFTs are supposed to be in the camp of the decentralized “Web3” internet; influencers depend heavily on Web2, meaning centralized social platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. “Social media-style platforms that have enabled influencers to use their influence and profit are just going to extend their influence and profit in new ways. It’s not ultimately interesting or different, and so in some sense would not be what you’d hope to see out of NFTs.”

At the same time, NFT projects often need social media and influencers to get a chance to take off. I found Colton’s cartoon characters Discord channel because I follow Colton on Instagram. Crypto needs hype to keep it going, and it’s finding some friends in Bachelor stars. Maybe they really believe in the future of the project; maybe they recognize a money-making opportunity when they see it.

“Often it seems the line is this idea of do you, as the influencer, believe in what you’re selling? Or is this something authentic? And that’s a very fraught term,” said Megan Sawey, a PhD candidate at Cornell studying new media technologies. “At a certain point, we accepted that promotion was going to be part of the deal.”

If you insist on getting crypto advice from Bachelor people, you should know they’re being paid for it

I reached out to several experts to ask them what they make of Bachelor stars and, more broadly, influencers offering financial advice and pushing crypto online. Most told me the same thing: This isn’t really a question of Bachelor cast members’ choices, it’s a question of what regulators will do about any of this.

“Sure, it’s unfortunate and disappointing that influencers might choose to work with particular brands or shill products where claims aren’t necessarily proven. That’s disappointing, but I think the bigger issue here is a lack of regulation for this industry,” said Emily Hund, a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has rules around disclosures for social media influencers — basically, people are supposed to say if they’re being paid to recommend something. That’s why you see a lot of #ad and #sponsored tags on posts. But some experts say that’s not enough and worry that the FTC is behind the curve.

“As we’ve become more reliant on humans as living billboards … their job got much harder, and they haven’t kept up on technology,” said Nizan Geslevich Packin, an associate professor of law at the Baruch College Zicklin School of Business.

Packin specifically worries about fintech and platforms such as Robinhood that have made it much easier for an inexperienced trader to buy and sell stocks and crypto, often on the recommendation of someone they saw on TikTok or Twitter. “The decade that the FTC has sort of frozen, in terms of updates, is also the decade that fintech has exploded,” she said.

Technology and trends are moving much faster than the FTC does. Grant, from Be Social, estimates she gets approached by half a dozen companies a week seeking to launch an NFT with one of her creators or get one involved in some capacity. She says she advises her clients, which includes some former Bachelor contestants such as Cassie Randolph, to be discerning. “If you said yes to everything that came your way as an influencer, yes, you can make tons of money, so much money. But what you lose along the way is credibility, authenticity, and your biggest asset, your following.”

Maybe Colton’s animal NFT project will take off. Maybe it will fade away and everybody will forget. Maybe it will cost his followers money — many NFT projects will probably fail — and they’ll think twice about following him into his next endeavor.

on wednesdays we drink wine and talk nfts. that’s a thing now!

— coltonunderwood.eth (@colton) January 27, 2022

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