John McAfee was a creature of the crypto market’s moods. He arrived loudly in its first mania, exited at the top of its second, and the token bearing his name has spent the years since fading along with the speculative energy that created it. Five years after his death, it is worth standing at three points on the chart, the interview, the death, and today, and asking what the market looked like each time. The picture says as much about crypto’s cycles as it does about the man.
When he spoke: early 2020
When Jillian Godsil interviewed McAfee, and when he was giving his Faraday-cage podcast appearances about McAfeeDEX, the calendar read January and February 2020. The market was quietly optimistic and still small.
Bitcoin began 2020 at roughly $7,200 and climbed through January to around $9,350, brushing the $10,000 line in February. Ethereum was trading in the low hundreds of dollars, somewhere around $130 to $230. The total value of every cryptocurrency in existence sat in the low hundreds of billions of dollars. By the standards of what was coming, this was a fringe asset class having a good month.
This is the McAfee most people remember: the man who had bet, very publicly, that Bitcoin would reach extraordinary numbers, $500,000 by 2020 in one version, which he later waved away as a deliberate joke to drum up attention. In early 2020 that prediction looked absurd, and Bitcoin was trading two orders of magnitude below it. The market was a believer’s market, full of conviction and short on institutions. It suited him. His pitch, that decentralised tools would put money beyond government reach, landed in a space that still felt like a frontier.
Then March 2020 arrived. As COVID-19 hit, Bitcoin crashed roughly 58% in days, from around $9,100 to below $4,000, and Ethereum fell harder. The market McAfee had been talking up nearly halved before it began the run that would define the next phase.
When he died: June 2021
By the time McAfee was found dead on 23 June 2021, the market was a different animal entirely, and it was already turning.
The post-COVID bull run had been enormous. Bitcoin had reached an all-time high near $64,000 in April 2021, dragged up by institutional buyers, corporate treasuries, and the first wave of mainstream adoption. But by late June the euphoria was cooling fast. Bitcoin had fallen back into the low-to-mid $30,000s, with June 2021 averaging around $35,800. Ethereum, which had touched new highs of its own that spring, was trading around $1,900. The total market sat in the region of $1.4 trillion, several times larger than when McAfee gave his interview eighteen months earlier.
So McAfee died not at the bottom and not at the peak, but in the queasy correction that follows a mania. It is a fitting place on the chart for him to exit. The token that carried his name spiked roughly 733% in the days after his death, briefly touching an all-time high of $0.082111 on 27 June, four days later. It was the only real move $WHACKD ever made, and it was powered entirely by his death rather than anything the market itself was doing. The wider market, meanwhile, kept sliding into a long, grinding cooldown.
Now: June 2026
Five years on, the contrast is sharp in a way McAfee would have appreciated. Bitcoin is far higher than at either earlier moment, and yet the mood is the gloomiest of the three.
As of early June 2026, Bitcoin is trading around $63,000, having opened the month closer to $73,500 and slid through it. Ethereum, strikingly, is roughly where it was when McAfee died, around $1,700, despite Bitcoin being nearly double its 2021 death-day level. The total crypto market cap sits near $2.1 trillion, down about 8.7% in a single week. Commentators are describing the moment in the language of one of the worst pullbacks of the cycle, with a “higher-for-longer” interest-rate backdrop, heavy derivatives liquidations, and sticky inflation draining risk appetite.
Put plainly: the asset class is vastly bigger and more established than in McAfee’s day, but it is currently in a fearful, bearish stretch. Bitcoin near $63,000 would have been unthinkable to the believers of early 2020, and yet the people who own it today feel more like survivors than evangelists. The frontier has become an industry, and industries have bear markets.
What the three snapshots say
Lay the three moments side by side and a pattern emerges that outlives McAfee himself.
The numbers go up over the long arc, and the conviction does not move with them. In 2020, with Bitcoin under $10,000, the market brimmed with belief. In 2026, with Bitcoin around $63,000, it is anxious and defensive. That inversion is the real lesson of the chart. Price and sentiment are not the same thing, and the people who do best across cycles are usually the ones who notice when the two have come apart.
McAfee understood the theatre of that better than almost anyone, even if he profited from it in ways that later put him under indictment. He sold belief at the frontier and exited as the second mania broke. His token now trades for fractions of a cent in a market worth trillions, a small, quiet monument to how far crypto has travelled and how little the human cycle underneath it has changed.
Five years after his death, the market he helped publicise is larger, more regulated, and considerably less sure of itself. He would probably have found that funny.
Part of Blockleaders’ “John McAfee: Five Years On” series. See also our $WHACKD token explainer, Jillian Godsil’s reflection on the man, and our evidence-led look at the death controversy.
