Fortune Crypto’s 2023 Jealousy List
“‘What a year it’s been,’ said a member of the Fortune Crypto team—at least once a week,” is how we began this post last year, and, hoo boy, 2023 did not take its foot off the pedal.
Bitcoin soared. Ripple (mostly) won. SBF was convicted. CZ cut a deal. And Do Kwon ended up spending a lot more time in Montenegro than he’d originally planned.
Other outlets also did terrific work in covering these stories and many more, so with a nod to the OG Jealousy List, courtesy of the fine folks at Bloomberg Businessweek—which is relaunching next year as a monthly—Businessmonth? BbgBizMth? bbm?—here’s some of the best stuff we’ve read this year, beginning with a brilliant piece of their own.
Bloomberg Businessweek: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire
By Max Chafkin and Hannah Miller
The cover said it all: “Meet the Parents.” This thorough and damning account of Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, esteemed Stanford Law School professors who “really opened doors for Sam,” explores the intricate role each played in their son’s building of FTX—and its calamitous demise. A friend of theirs quoted in the story notes: “It’s hard to wrap one’s head around ‘How could they not know?’ The most sense I can make of it is that it was blind faith. They didn’t have the full picture.” This story is as close as we’ll ever get to the full picture.
—Justin Doom, editor
The New York Times: Their Crypto Company Collapsed. They Went to Bali.
By David Yaffe-Bellany
What’s fun about this gem of a profile is that it gets at the tone-deafness of many in the crypto industry, where making a quick buck is often the be-all and end-all. The Three Arrows Capital founders, Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, were responsible for one of the largest bankruptcies in crypto in 2022, but they seemed unfazed by losing billions of dollars, so much so that they sailed away to Bali. Also, what a fun last two paragraphs:
He left the restaurant at midnight, strolling down a busy street lined with outdoor bars, where murmurs of late-night conversation echoed in the distance. He was beaming.
“If anyone has any problems,” Mr. Davies declared, “just go to Bali.” Then he turned, swaying slightly, and walked into the night.
—Ben Weiss, crypto fellow
FT Alphaville: U.S. dollar dominance is facing a crypto-yuan hostile takeover
By Jay Newman and Richard Carty
Reporting on crypto, even by top financial publications, typically overlooks the geopolitical struggles that have made it such an ideological lightning rod in capitals around the globe. Those struggles are defined by the efforts of China, Russia, and others to weaken the hegemony of the dollar and undermine U.S. influence around the globe. This piece of FT commentary provides sophisticated insights into the financial great game and how U.S. rivals are using blockchain technology—particularly stablecoins—to open up new financial corridors beyond the control of Uncle Sam.
—Jeff John Roberts, editor
The Wall Street Journal: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Psychiatrist Became a Key Player at Crypto Exchange FTX
By Alexander Osipovich, Hannah Miao, and Caitlin Ostroff
You may not think of a psychiatrist as essential to a multibillion-dollar company, but at FTX the in-house shrink, or “coach,” was more than just an amenity. Dr. George Lerner, who also served as Sam Bankman-Fried’s personal psychiatrist, apparently helped FTX employees with everything from suicidal thoughts to dating advice. This story, which dives deep into what Lerner added at FTX, opens a window into the demanding and problematic work culture at the now-bankrupt crypto company.
—Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, reporter
Time magazine: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed
By Charlotte Alter
As journalists sifted through the rubble of FTX, one particular strain of thought came under heavy scrutiny: effective altruism. Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and other FTX staffers were believers in the philosophy, which, at its most basic, preaches that, with our limited financial resources, we should focus on maximizing good. In a series of articles, Time dug into the effective altruist movement, and this piece illustrates the complicity of some of the group’s leaders in enabling Bankman-Fried’s rise.
—Ben Weiss, crypto fellow
New York Magazine: How the Winklevii’s Second Act Went Bad
By Kevin T. Dugan
“I’m 6-foot-5, 220, and there’s two of me,” a semi-fictionalized Cameron Winklevoss famously said in The Social Network, introducing the world to the towering twins who got rich by suing Mark Zuckerberg and dumping their winnings into Bitcoin. As Kevin Dugan artfully details in this new profile, the Winklevii are back at their litigious hijinks, now waging a legal battle against former business partner Barry Silbert and the Digital Currency Group. This time around, they may not get another chance.
—Leo Schwartz, reporter
TechCrunch: Ordinals creator views his Bitcoin-centric creation as ‘digital artifacts,’ not just NFTs
By Jacquelyn Melinek
The invention of Ordinals helped transform the once-high-flying NFT industry in 2023. As TechCrunch writer Jacquelyn Melinek writes, the NFTs which are “inscribed” on the smallest denomination of a Bitcoin were immediately popular—although their creator did not imagine how they would catch on. Casey Rodarmor said his creation filled a special niche in the NFT market for collectors looking for “on-chain, immutable NFTs that are there forever.”
—Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, reporter
Bloomberg: Crypto’s Most Powerful Woman Speaks Out as Crisis Rocks Binance
By Muyao Shen and Justina Lee
Crypto is often reported from a U.S.-focused, English-speaking perspective, which means many of the most interesting stories—and figures—are often ignored. In this terrific profile, Bloomberg was able to spend three hours with one of the industry’s most enigmatic leaders—the Binance senior executive Yi He, who happens to also have children with founder Changpeng Zhao—with the interview taking place in Dubai and conducted in Mandarin. As crypto continues to gravitate outside the U.S., it’s the type of coverage that will prove the most valuable to readers.
—Leo Schwartz, reporter
The New York Times: How a Crypto Fugitive Upended the Politics of a Troubled Balkan Nation
By Andrew Higgins
While he was known on Crypto Twitter for trash-talking “the poor,” in the real world former Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon was using his wealth to influence an election in Montenegro. While being held in jail in the Balkan nation, Kwon sent a handwritten letter to authorities talking up his “very successful investment relationship” with Milojko Spajic, leader of the Europe Now Party. When word got out, Europe Now fared worse than expected at the polls. Through a series of interviews with Montenegrin politicians, Andrew Higgins elaborates on how a meddling crypto entrepreneur added more instability to an already tenuous election.
—Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, reporter
Rest of World: The workers at the front lines of the AI revolution
By Andrew Deck
Everyone is writing about AI and the myriad ways it will transform the global economy, but how many publications included a graphic at the top of a major story in which a young woman’s photo on an ID badge transmutes into a cyborg and back again? Rest of World does a lot of things really well, but perhaps what it does best is visual storytelling. Throughout this story are sleek side-by-side comparisons of tasks completed with or without AI, how long each took to complete, and what each cost to produce. The potential effects of generative AI on workers the world over could not be made clearer.
—Justin Doom, editor
The Verge: AI Is a Lot of Work
By Josh Dzieza
AI will automate, AI will liberate, AI will free us from drudgery! That’s been the (paraphrased) rallying cry for many in Silicon Valley over the past year. However, that’s only true for some, per this feature from The Verge:
Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people—huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused.
—Ben Weiss, crypto fellow
The New Yorker: A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
By James Somers
It wasn’t so long ago that “learn to code” was a mantra at education and business forums across the land. Today, AI is on the cusp of rendering large swaths of the once-prestigious position obsolete, leaving many to wonder what they will do instead. In this beautifully written elegy, Somers explains the delights he finds in what many of us consider to be a forbidding and mind-numbing activity. A veteran coder who rode the wave of coding’s zenith, when firms like Facebook and Google coddled early twentysomethings with lavish pay and nap rooms, Somers offers a look at the near future where ChatGPT replaces most of his once-indispensable labor.
—Jeff John Roberts, editor
The New York Times Magazine: Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?
By Caity Weaver
Meetings? Glitter? #VanLife? “Endless Appetizers” at TGI Fridays? Caity Weaver has you covered. Her latest masterstroke is a serious but somehow still laugh-out-loud profile of a woman most of us see every day but know very little about.
—Justin Doom, editor
Slate: I Ate at the Italian Restaurant Where George Santos Is Often, for Some Reason, Spending Exactly $199.99
By Alexander Sammon
It may not come as a surprise that we love a good scammer story here at Fortune Crypto. And if anyone could beat out Sam Bankman-Fried for grifter of the year, it would be New York’s own George Santos. In this gonzo investigative piece, a reporter tries to get to the bottom of the Santos campaign’s mysterious restaurant charges by going to his favorite Italian joint in Queens and sampling its average fare to try to sniff out fraud. If only SBF spent his billions on gnocchi.
—Leo Schwartz, reporter
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
