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

by Zeke Faux

Newspapers filled with stories about people who’d lost their life savings. I spoke to Odosa Iyamuosa, a twenty-eight-year-old who lived in Abuja, Nigeria, who told me he’d thought Terra-Luna was his best hope to get out of a city where he said many jobs paid just two dollars a day, or less. He’d scraped together a little money selling knockoff Nike and Adidas sneakers to local buyers he found on Instagram. He wanted to increase his savings to $16,000 and enroll in a data-analytics program at a college in Toronto so he could get a job at a big American company, like Netflix or Google. For a few months, it looked like his plan was working. But after the crash, he was down to his last twenty dollars. He told me he was still on Twitter and the chat app Discord, hunting for a crypto project to make his money back. “There’s literally nothing else for me again,” he told me. “I don’t know, man. Honestly, there’s no job. There’s no nothing.” Many investors wrote letters to the judge overseeing Celsius’s bankruptcy, pleading for access to their funds. They didn’t understand the money was gone, gambled away by Mashinsky. A thirty-six-year-old regional bank manager in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with two small children, said that he’d lost $205,000, his entire retirement savings. A shepherd in Ireland said he had lost his farm. And a stunt double in Los Angeles said he was facing eviction. “No person would ever allow a financial company to hold their money under the pretense they could t...