Cryptomania

June 24, 2024
Chow, a tech reporter for Time, debuts with a scrupulous postmortem of how “ego and arrogance” drove the 2022 cryptocurrency crash. Blaming the collapse on the “Jenga tower of insanely risky financial instruments” engineered by FTX exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Chow portrays the former mogul as a child of privilege who fostered a “relentless work culture” marked by 15-hour days and indulged in risky trades despite promising creditors to do the opposite. Covering the saga through Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction, Chow provides a more complete tally of his subject’s misdeeds than previous treatments, but he really shines in contrasting the FTX founder with the stories of genuine blockchain idealists. For instance, Chow describes how 25-year-old Nigerian artist Owo Anietie hoped to lift his family out of poverty and fund local initiatives by selling NFTs for crypto, only to grow cynical after FTX’s bankruptcy rendered the NFT market virtually worthless. More pointedly, Chow presents Russian-born computer programmer Vitalik Buterin, creator of the blockchain Ethereum, as the anti-SBF, a true believer in decentralizing financial power to the extent that he negotiated down his share of the business in 2022. Buoyed by richly reported portraits of well-known and obscure players connected to FTX’s collapse, this is a worthy addition to the crowded field of crypto investigations. Photos. Agent: Todd Schuster, Aevitas Creative Management.