Why Grayscale's New Digital Currency Ad Could Bring Crypto Investing To Millions

Last Friday Grayscale founder and CEO Barry Silbert teased a massive ad buy on Twitter with the intention to "Brrring crypto to the masses" - and this morning he delivered, with spots on CNBC, MSNBC, FOX, and FOX Business, among others.

On paper that sounds easy enough, but the practicalities are grimmer - just about every crypto enthusiast is familiar with the scoffs, the furrowed brows, and the incredulous stares when discussing crypto with family members during the holidays.

Powerful people are finally starting to Get It. The market makers, from their perches atop the economy, are now aping the same arguments that Bitcoin acolytes have pounded into the table for years: it's a hedge against inflation says Paul Tudor Jones; it's digital gold.

While the good folks down in lower Manhattan are coming around, the same cannot be said for Main Street investors, who have been fed a thin diet of skepticism on digital assets by financial gurus.

Macroeconomic conditions daily concoct new ways to demonstrate the need for cryptocurrency and yet barely a quarter.

Nearing the end of 1948, the United States grappled with similarly bleak conditions to those today: the postwar economy was caught in the grips of a recession, facing a stock and bond market starved of liquidity, and inflation and unemployment rates both nearing 10%. And with the Great Recession very much in living memory, few were willing to take risks with their money.

Private investment from the middle class could have bolstered the nation's outlook and protected the wealth of countless families, but there weren't many transparent, mainstream ways for individual investors to access stock and bond markets.

The legendary banker is credited for popularizing stock and bond investments at a time when they remained alien to most of the population.

There remained the question of how to attract a whole population to a foreign asset class at a time when individual investment participation sat in the low single-digit percentile.

The tip of the spear for this educational effort was Merrill Lynch's 1948 ad in the New York Times.