"This is the story of the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen. It started as an investigation of a coin called Tether that served as a kind of bank for the industry. But it morphed into a two-year journey that would stretch from Manhattan to Miami, to Switzerland, Italy, the Bahamas, El Salvador, and the Philippines. It is based on hundreds of interviews with people at every level of crypto, from gamblers to coders to promoters to billionaires. I visited their yachts and parties at the pinnacle of the frenzy and their hideouts as the authorities were closing in. From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined. Never before has so much wealth been generated with such flimsy schemes. But what shocked me was not the vapidity of the crypto bros. It was how their heedlessness had devastating consequences for people across the world. By the end, I’d find myself in Cambodia, investigating how crypto fueled a vast human-trafficking scheme run by Chinese gangsters."