Going Nowhere Good: Bloomberg's Zeke Faux On Crypto Titans, Crooks, Evangelists and Hangers-On

Plus, an early SEC win against Coinbase could signal a shift in the crypto regulatory landscape.

Number of the Week: $3.72 million (explanation below) 

Going Nowhere Good: Bloomberg's Zeke Faux On Crypto Titans, Crooks, Evangelists and Hangers-On

In the debut of FIN’s Fast Forward Podcast, host Holly Sraeel and guest Zeke Faux, Bloomberg News investigative reporter and author of “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall”—an insanely frank, often dark, and yet hilarious look at crypto captains, crooks, evangelists, and hangers-on—discuss the urgent takeaways from his two-year trek around the world as he sought to uncover the truth about the stablecoin Tether, and eventually found himself dealing with some of the strangest, most reckless and wildly cult-like characters in the crypto universe. We also debate the behavioral implications of Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence on other market players, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ongoing enforcement efforts against crypto exchanges Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, the threats that crypto poses to the Everyman investor, and crypto’s long-term place—if any—in the global financial system. (To prove his point, Faux did some reporting for the podcast on the difficulties of using Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 network.) Faux’s fast forward on the industry: It’s going nowhere good.