After years on the financial world's margins, crypto went mainstream in early 2021. Everybody was talking about it: giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady and Justin Bieber endorsed it, and Washington bigwigs debated new regulations, as if it would be a permanent part of our financial system. It seemed like everyone knew someone who was bragging about their returns from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other bizarrely named "digital assets." FOMO spread: Was crypto the new path to financial freedom? It didn't seem to matter that hardly anyone knew how it worked. The longer prices went up and up, the harder it was to resist. To borrow a phrase from crypto parlance, the only thing that mattered was "number go up."
Observing this mania, Zeke Faux set out on a quest to pull back the curtain on the wizards behind this new financial machinery. He first set his sights on Tether, a digital currency dreamed up by a former child actor from the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks. Tether had become crypto's de facto bank, with $69 billion pouring into it. Each Tether was supposedly backed by one dollar. But where was the money? Then, in 2022, the crypto bubble burst, and Tether's biggest customers started collapsing one by one. It culminated in November, when FTX-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, a schlubby 29-year-old Fortune once suggested was "The Next Warren Buffett" - failed in spectacular fashion.
As he chases these intersecting storylines around the globe, Faux is driven by a nagging question: Is it all just a global confidence game of unprecedented proportions? In El Salvador, he finds a country reeling from the authoritarian president's decision to gamble its treasury on Bitcoin. A spam text message leads him to a crypto-fueled human-trafficking ring in Cambodia. In Lugano, Switzerland, he chases down the reclusive former plastic surgeon who runs Tether, and, in the Bahamas, Faux takes listeners inside the glittering sadness, lies and delusion of SBF's luxury loft in the days after FTX's implosion.
