Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by
Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020
Plenty of people had warned that the ICO economy was rife with scams, but now there was a growing pile of evidence. The Wall Street Journal report appeared as San Franciscans and New Yorkers alike basked in the glorious days of late spring. But in crypto circles, they were calling this period of time “crypto winter.” The phrase sprang from the lips of depressed investors and ricocheted around social media. As crypto prices continued to slide ever downward, it became clear the chill of crypto winter would not yield to a spring for a long time to come. • • • A burst of investment in crypto in early 2018, such as Peter Thiel’s $20 million bet, convinced some that the bubble hadn’t burst, but by May it became clear that the good times were over.
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When the talk turned to crypto, Adam and Fred congratulated Brian on taking his company back, and the three reminisced about the exploits that had seen them take Coinbase from a ramshackle apartment into a multibillion-dollar company. They drank and laughed, and for a few precious hours, Brian felt like he had back in the Bluxome Street days when Coinbase was a small startup. Outside, a heatwave was descending on New York. And crypto winter was beginning to thaw. 16 Bitcoin Triumphant The depth of crypto winter came on December 15, 2018. On that day, the price of bitcoin dipped to $3,200—more than 80 percent below its high a year earlier. The handful of mainstream media outlets still reporting on crypto noted how far the industry had fallen, and a few pundits pronounced that this time bitcoin was dead for good.
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The Outlaw Currency 3. Running through Brick Walls 4. Bust 5. Hard Times 6. Civil War PART TWO From Boom to Bubble to Bust 7. Enter Ethereum 8. Wall Street Comes Calling 9. Brian Has a Master Plan 10. Uncle Sam Comes Calling 11. Initial Coin Insanity 12. Coinbase Crackup PART THREE From Crypto Winter to the Crypto Future 13. Hangover 14. “Getting Our Asses Kicked” 15. Power Struggle 16. Bitcoin Triumphant 17. The Future of Finance Epilogue Index Acknowledgments About the Author A Note on Sources I first encountered bitcoin and Coinbase in 2013. I was a reporter at the tech blog GigaOm, where I reported on collisions between law and technology—including the then-novel phenomenon of cryptocurrency.
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by
Ben McKenzie
and
Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023
Billions of dollars, some of it of dubious origin, changed hands, as crypto fortunes were made and lost overnight. The whole thing imploded in a mess of crashing token prices, fraud, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement actions in the spring of 2018, leading to a prolonged “crypto winter.” The token-mania of 2017 helped show that a different way was possible. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies didn’t have to be money or a store of long-term value. They could be wildly speculative instruments, pumped via hype, social media, and celebrity endorsements. They didn’t really have to do anything except rise in price.
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Crypto lenders that, following Celsius’s model, offered improbably high yields and gamified rewards, abruptly paused withdrawals. It appeared likely that few of them would ever open again. Bankruptcies proliferated, as did emergency capital infusions and loan packages from FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, who had ended up in the business of picking survivors for the oncoming crypto winter. One of them was BlockFi, another crypto lender that offered huge, and unsustainable, interest rates on customer deposits. SBF gave BlockFi an emergency loan of $250 million on June 21—only to buy the company a month later in an odd deal that valued BlockFi as low as $15 million. A year earlier, BlockFi had attempted to raise funds at a company valuation of $5 billion.
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He kept giving interviews—and kept up his League of Legends habit—while trying to wrest back control of a company that he thought had been taken from him prematurely. As Sam continued his apology tour, crypto brayed for blood, hoping to sacrifice SBF on the altar of industry villainy and then move on, building through the crypto winter that had already set in. On December 12, hours after he publicly declared that he didn’t expect to be arrested, SBF was arrested in the Bahamas, at the request of US authorities. That day, in a Bahamian court, SBF declared his intent to fight extradition. When the judge referred to him as a fugitive, Sam’s mother, Barbara Fried, laughed.
Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by
Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019
An army of zealots is continuing to build the infrastructure, consumer-friendly interfaces, and scaling solutions that will fuel the next phase of growth. The Brave web browser, which runs on the Ethereum blockchain, has more than one million downloads. Coinbase has added forty-nine new coins, expanded globally, quadrupled in size, and is valued at more than six billion dollars. My former client, BitGo, had a great year despite the crypto winter. They introduced a professional-grade custody solution for institutional investors and extended their multisig wallet to support sixty-two crypto assets, many of them tokens on the Ethereum blockchain that power dApps. They also landed a forty-five million-dollar funding round. (I can only hope they found someone to write those data sheets.)
The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by
Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020
They were exploring uses like decentralized securities trading, property rights, and identity. Excitement around those projects and some merchant adoption pushed Bitcoin above $100 and then $1,000 for the first time in 2013. But practical uses were still unheard-of, and soon Bitcoin plunged back to around $500, leaving most of these experiments frozen in the first crypto winter. True believers kept tinkering, and the Bitcoin community kept growing, populated mostly by young men with some background in tech or economics, who leaned libertarian. They coalesced in the BitcoinTalk online forum and on Reddit. It didn’t matter that most had never met each other or that they didn’t know each other’s real names.
Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make it Work for Everyone
by
John Y. Campbell
and
Tarun Ramadorai
Published 25 Jul 2025
Not only have they not learned to avoid concentrating their portfolios in a few stocks, but they may well have persuaded others to follow this unwise strategy by talking up their success. During crypto booms, boosters of crypto investments boast of their profits and persuade others to pile in—with all-too-evident misery for the late arrivals when prices eventually fall in a “crypto winter.” Luck has particularly pernicious effects when it is confused with skill. As we have discussed, people typically exaggerate their own skill; they also tend to credit their victories to skill and blame their defeats on bad fortune, a psychological phenomenon known as the illusion of control or “biased self-attribution.”19 For example, a recent study of millions of investors in Indian initial public offerings (IPOs) shows that investors who were randomly allocated IPO shares that went up in value reacted by trading furiously in other stocks.
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
by
Benjamin Wallace
Published 18 Mar 2025
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Eighty-six percent of Americans had heard of crypto.: “16% of Americans Say They Have Ever Invested in, Traded or Used Cryptocurrency,” Pew Research Center, November 11, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT more than $5 billion worth of bitcoin: Arnold Kirimi, “MicroStrategy CEO Won’t Sell $5B BTC Stash Despite Crypto Winter,” Cointelegraph, January 20, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A man in Wales: Chris Morris, “The Welshman Who Accidentally Threw Out 8,000 Bitcoin in 2013 Is Mounting an $11 Million Campaign to Get It Back,” Fortune, August 1, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT robbers wearing balaclavas: Melanie Kramer, “Dutch Bitcoin Trader Suffers Brutal Torture with a ‘Heavy Drill’ in Violent Robbery,” Yahoo!