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

by Zeke Faux

Van der Velde said he was taking a leap of faith by even talking to me. He was upset that the Financial Times had written an article critical of his résumé. Among other issues, he ran a Chinese electronics exporter that had made a government list of “seriously untrustworthy and law violating” companies, and worked as a salesman for a Hong Kong company that sold a product it claimed made smoking cigarettes good for you. “If you dip the butt of the cigarette into VitaCool when you smoke a cigarette, surprisingly 80 percent of nicotine will be transformed into vitamins,” the company claimed.

In December, a Chelsea art-gallery owner named Todd Kramer had lost $2.2 million of apes. “I been hacked,” he tweeted plaintively, “all my apes gone.”