Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

By 2023, the hot spots for crypto billionaires had shifted from the Bahamas and Miami Beach to the courthouses of Washington, D.C., and Manhattan. There was the Celsius bankruptcy, the Voyager bankruptcy, the Three Arrows bankruptcy, and the FTX bankruptcy. Do Kwon, the Terra-Luna scammer, was arrested that March at an airport in Montenegro, while trying to fly to Dubai using fake Costa Rican identity papers. (He has denied wrongdoing.) In June, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed giant lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase. The agency basically alleged that much of the crypto trading that went on openly on their websites was in fact illegal. It didn’t explain why it waited out an entire boom and bust and watched countless people lose their shirts before raising any objections.