This is the inside story of the first great crypto bubble.
Over ninety million people have a Coinbase account, each one hoping to strike it big. But is there more to cryptocurrency than hitting the jackpot? Could we use this technology to make the world a better place?
That was the challenge Joe Lubin, dubbed by the Financial Times as the "crypto whisperer" to Wall Street, posed to Faisal Khan across a cafe table in early 2017. Worth more than $30 billion at its peak, Joe founded his company ConsenSys with the aim to do nothing less than to rewire the internet itself.
Within weeks of accepting Joe's challenge, he found himself on a journey around the globe, pitching board rooms in New York and celebrities in Los Angeles how the magic of the blockchain would help us fight the excesses of Big Tech and Big Banks.
Rivals soon sought to crush them, from IBM to Wall Street. Would they succeed in "flipping" Bitcoin? Or be steamrolled as corporations swept in?
ConsenSys minted hundreds of millions in a few short months, even as employees ran amok with wild experiments from music streaming to asteroid mining—bringing them to the brink of ruin.
Along the way, Khan explains how to make millions off crypto tokens, impress a venture capitalist with just a tweet, and convince a government to buy vaporware. Through ConsenSys' rise, his story probes the zeitgeist of a time when young men with too much money and too much power worked to create a future they hadn't fully thought through.
https://startupsandecon.substack.com/