And they wouldn’t be the first founders of a collapsed crypto project to go on and set up another and even to make a lot of money from it.
Do Kwon, the founder of the collapsed Terra/Luna “algorithmic stablecoin” project that at one point was worth more than US$41 billion, and who now faces legal action in several countries, had previously been the co-founder of a rather similar stablecoin named Basis Cash, which had itself collapsed in 2021.
“There are two sides to crypto – the shysters and the suckers,” finance and economics commentator Frances Coppola tells me. “The shysters, when they walk away from one failed venture, they’ll just set up another one … If you can do it all again, why not?”
In the non-crypto world, there are rules, norms and mores that would aim to prevent this kind of thing from happening. But cryptoland is not a regular place; it is a largely unregulated free-for-all of hype, grift and charlatanism, where value is sustained only by the idea that there will always be a greater fool than you around.
In a world that rewards and thrives on shamelessness, why not behave as shamelessly as possible? And if you are already disgraced, why not disgrace yourself some more?
“In a sense it seems really absurd that [they] would try to monetise crypto bankruptcy, but it also makes sense in terms of the general trajectory of crypto,” Jacob Silverman, co-author of the upcoming book Easy Money, tells me. “There’s just no cost to anything and … there are very few accountability mechanisms.”
Whatever highfalutin things you might have been told, crypto is only really about one thing: Making a quick buck. And from that perspective, what GTX is trying to do here is about as sensible and rational as the rest of the crypto world. The only problem, of course, is that it is also morally bankrupt.
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