Red Emma’s

The cryptocurrency industry is once again surging, with its leaders boasting about the untold riches it will bring to its believers. All of this sounds awfully familiar. After all, a similar boom happened just three years ago over the pandemic, as new converts bought into the idea that crypto would not only make them rich, but would usher in imminent revolutions across art, finance, politics, and gaming. Cryptocurrency caught the zeitgeist through figures like FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who only two years later would be convicted of one of the most calamitous acts of financial fraud in US history.

During his meteoric rise, Sam Bankman-Fried outflanked idealists in the movement like Vitalik Buterin, who sought to build fairer, more democratic systems through Ethereum. Bankman-Fried pursued a growth-obsessed, by-any-means approach to crypto, which proved seductive to those who just wanted to get rich. But this Silicon Valley-like approach also drove the creation of a spate of high-risk financial instruments that mirrored those of the 2008 financial crisis. Accused of misleading investors and mishandling funds, Bankman-Fried became a target of prosecutors.

Now, Cryptomania unfolds the tumultuous twenty months inside this male-dominated, overhyped industry that led to its downfall. Drawing on exclusive reporting and an extensive network in the global NFT community, Andrew Chow chronicles the battle for crypto's soul, and the human toll of its economic meltdown--from the conmen and eccentrics driving the bubble to the victims caught in its burst.

In this discussion, Chow will discuss this history as well as crypto's more recent resurrection act with Osita Nwanevu, delving into the industry's attempts to influence the 2024 election with an unprecedented financial campaign, and its glee at the victory of Donald Trump.

Andrew R. Chow is a correspondent for Time who covers technology, culture, and business. He has written five Time cover stories, including about the impacts of the AI corporate arms race and a prescient profile of Vitalik Buterin months before the 2022 crypto crash. He has previously written for The New York Times, Pitchfork, and NBC News. Cryptomania is his first book.

Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian. He is a former staff writer at The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Gawker. His first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, will be published by Random House next year. Nwanevu is a former editor in chief of the South Side Weekly, a Chicago alternative newspaper. He is a graduate of the College at the University of Chicago and the Harris School of Public Policy. He lives in Baltimore.