Public Biography
Vivian Halper-Cole is the lead analyst on consumer sentiment products at the Center for Tokenized Affect Research in Palo Alto, California, where she has worked since the center’s founding in 2024. She is widely regarded as the principal market authority on the crypto greeting card sector.
Ms. Halper-Cole, 39, holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Wesleyan University and a Master of Science in marketing analytics from the New York University Stern School of Business. Before joining the center, she spent seven years at Nielsen, where she led the consumer attitudes practice, and three years at a boutique consultancy advising greeting card publishers on category decline. She has described the latter experience as “formative, in that I came away convinced the category was not declining but migrating.”
She is the author of the center’s flagship publication, the monthly Tokenized Sentiment Index, and the lead researcher on the white paper Toward a Standardized Pricing Model for Ambient Sympathy (2025). Her commentary appears regularly in Bloomberg, Fortune, Token Quarterly, and the trade publication Sentiment Weekly. She has testified once before a House Financial Services subcommittee, on the question of whether bereavement tokens should be classified as securities, an appearance that was widely covered for the testimony’s calm refusal to take a position.
Ms. Halper-Cole lives in Mountain View. She is married, with two children, and has reportedly never sent a crypto greeting card herself, a fact she has acknowledged in two separate interviews and has described as “professionally appropriate distance.”