Happy New Year! (and 2022 Roundup)
It was a real m*therfucker, y'all
No, that title is not a typo. I’m just now getting to take my holiday vacation days, which I mostly didn’t. So now is also the first chance I’ve really had to take a look back at 2022, and forward to 2023.
The past three months have been nutty for two big reasons. First and most recently, I’ve been on a sort of creative Death March to complete CoinDesk’s first narrative podcast, Crypto Crooks. I wrote the equivalent of 2/3rds of a book (160 pages of script for eight episodes) in a little over two months. Really insane, my brain is still smoking.
But I’m so incredibly proud of the show that we made. Not least because I personally wrote a whole damn documentary – but the entire team is incredible. It has felt like being in a really solid band that just happens to operate inside a large company. In particular I’ve been ecstatic to work with my brother-from-another-mother, Altus Noumena, who is handling our music and sound design.
The show is really good. Check it out.
But Crypto Crooks is only part of the 2022 story.
CoinDesk Ascendant
2022 was a crazy year in crypto, where I have been lucky enough to spend most of my time. The team at CoinDesk managed to climb the ladder of that chaos to a new level of respectability while helping to eliminate the bad actors who tend to surface at the peak of crypto bubbles. I feel very gratified about my contributions to that.
It really started back in April, when I warned of an imminent giant financial implosion (of the Terra blockchain) that then actually happened two weeks later. I remain fascinated by Terra/Luna, mostly because it was so manifestly stupid, yet managed to trick so many supposedly smart people.
The year’s really wild moment, of course, came in early November, when CoinDesk’s Ian Allison changed the whole game by pulling at a small thread. His discovery of a fragmentary, bizarre balance sheet for the offshore crypto exchange FTX and its illicit partner company Alameda Research became one of the biggest stories of the year, worldwide.
My contribution to the FTX saga felt rather modest from my end, but wound up having a wildly outsized impact. By late November, weeks after FTX declared bankruptcy, Sam Bankman-Fried’s apology tour had continued to confuse the issue of what exactly had actually happen. So I wrote a piece titled “FTX’s Collapse Was a crime, Not an Accident.”
That piece wound up being, I’m told, the most widely-shared CoinDesk piece ever outside of core crypto audiences. I’m not totally sure what that means, but it sure sounds good – and the piece certainly made tracks. It was widely praised by those in the industry.
But also people like Ann Coulter retweeted it approvingly, which was … interesting.
Then, roughly two weeks after my article blew up, SBF was charged and arrested.
The upshot is simple but stunning: It seems hard to avoid the idea that I had some direct influence on getting Sam Bankman-Fried locked up. I have enough faith in U.S. financial regulators that I doubt they needed my nudge to move on FTX, but nudge I nonetheless did. That’s a real head-trip, since it means a) reckoning with the reality of my own influence, and b) I HELPED SEND A GUY TO PRISON, probably. Obviously I’m proud of the work and he deserves it, but that’s not usually the kind of impact I think about my work having.
The incident also produced one of my own best tweets ever. This one’s for the hardcore:
(As an added bonus, 2022 also saw the prosecution and conviction of Trevor Milton, former CEO of “electric truck startup” Nikola. I knew this guy was a fraud from the second I heard the name of the company, which is why in 2020 I wrote this skeptical piece about their insane battery innovation lies. Not a scalp I can claim for my own, but still an incredible feeling knowing that I helped out.)
The Coming Peace
2023, then, I am hoping will be a year of rest and relaxation or at least getting my life back together. One of my commitments is to write this newsletter a tiny bit more regularly – once a month at least, which I’ve actually kept to so far. And they won’t all be this navel-gazey: Last month’s installment was a reading list that could really help you set an agenda for the year.
I am also going to be turning Crypto Crooks into a book. If you’re an agent or publisher interested in working with me, this is your extremely early chance to jump. I won’t be shopping this publicly for another month or two.
Finally, after reaching such professional heights, I also want to recommit to my fiction and creative practice, which has been languishing badly. I begin to feel a bit captured by my day job, which can be seductive because as it turns out I’m really, really good at this stuff. But there are other frontiers, and further to push.
Happy New Year,
David