14 min · 13 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Zeke Faux, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter, spends over a year chasing the truth behind crypto's boom, starting with one question: does Tether, the stablecoin underpinning nearly every crypto trade, actually hold the dollars it claims. His reporting across Manila, Sihanoukville, El Salvador, and the Bahamas argues that much of the industry's value was never technological innovation but unverified trust, and that this trust caused real damage to real people long before FTX collapsed.
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Who it's for
- Readers who want concrete evidence, not theory, about how crypto fraud actually works - Investors and journalists trying to size up risk in digital-asset markets - Anyone curious about the human cost behind the Axie Infinity, El Salvador, and FTX headlines
What’s inside
- 1The Question Nobody Would Answer1 min
Tether's claim to hold one real dollar for every token it issues was the load-bearing wall of the entire crypto economy, so if that claim was false, everything built on top of it was false too.
- 2Milan and the Man Who Wouldn't Meet Him1 min
Tether's opacity is not an accident of a young industry but a deliberate choice by people with strong incentives to avoid scrutiny.
- 3The Trust Machine1 min
Sam Bankman-Fried's success depended less on trading skill than on a carefully built image of altruistic genius that discouraged the scrutiny his business needed.
- 4Scholars of the Ronin Bridge1 min
Play-to-earn crypto games like Axie Infinity extracted real income and real debt from poor communities by dressing a pyramid scheme up as economic empowerment.
- 5A Volcano, a Wallet, and a Country's Bet1 min
El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender served President Nayib Bukele's brand and leverage against the IMF far more than it served ordinary Salvadorans.
- 6Pig Butchering in Sihanoukville1 min
Crypto's instant, irreversible, borderless transfers didn't just fail to prevent fraud, they built the infrastructure that made industrial-scale scam compounds possible.
- 7The Chain Reaction1 min
The May 2022 collapse of Terra's algorithmic stablecoin proved that crypto's supposed diversification was an illusion, because everything in the industry was quietly leveraged against everything else.
- 8The Adult in the Room Was a Fraud1 min
FTX's failure showed that the exchange treated as crypto's most trustworthy institution was, underneath its regulatory-friendly image, running the same trust-without-verification scheme as everyone else, just at greater scale.
- 9Tether, Still Standing1 min
Tether's survival through every crash of 2022, without ever producing the audit critics demanded, suggests the market cares more about having a workable dollar substitute than about verifying it.
- 10Why the Number Had to Go Up1 min
Crypto's actual product was never a technology, it was the psychological pleasure of watching a number rise, and that pleasure was strong enough to make smart, skeptical people ignore evidence of fraud.
About Zeke Faux
Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek who has covered corporate fraud for over a decade. For this book he traveled to Italy, the Philippines, El Salvador, Cambodia, and the Bahamas, interviewing stablecoin executives, scam victims, trafficked workers, and Sam Bankman-Fried himself before FTX collapsed.
