I can’t explain exactly how I ended up on crypto Twitter (or CT, as it’s known in the cryptosphere) and in the crypto-focused Telegram and Discord groups I started lurking in late last summer. As a writer I don’t really have a regular beat. I’ve occasionally written about fiction and film. I’ve written on the overlaps between the health and criminal legal systems. Crypto would not be an obvious story for me to tackle. But there was a bull run going on – market confidence was high, investors were buying and prices were going up – and whenever cryptocurrency values skyrocket, the corporate press turns up like a kettle of raptors spewing headlines about improbable fortunes. “This mom quit her job to focus on crypto full time and build ‘generational wealth.’ Now she makes around $80,000 per month.” “This 33-year-old ‘dogecoin millionaire’ is now being paid in the meme-inspired cryptocurrency — and continues to buy the dips.” The subject was impossible to avoid, and my longstanding if until now private, nerdy interest in the machinery of our enigmatic financial markets propelled me toward it.

At first I felt a little dirty, a little shameful. Everyone is in these spaces for one reason: to make money. It’s a subject that remains uncouth to speak about in my wider professional and social milieu. Soon, though, my shame started to interest me. I stayed a little longer, thumbing through channels on the subway or in bed late at night. It’s a kind of rubbernecking only the internet allows, providing near-full access to a subculture to which you don’t belong.

In time I grew familiar with the way the crypto obsessives express themselves, the phrases and acronyms they use: gm (good morning), wagmi (we’re all gonna make it), ngmi (not gonna make it), and its corollary hfsp (have fun staying poor). I learned to distinguish the swing traders and scalpers from the hodlers (hold on for dear life) and degens (degenerates, or speculation addicts) by the way they talk and post. I perceived the subcultures within their subculture  –  the Bitcoin maxis (Bitcoin is the one and only crypto) v the Ethereum maxis (Bitcoin is for boomers) v the Eth-killer maxis (Ethereum is ngmi)  – and how they signal their allegiances through their avatars (Bitcoin maxis often have lasers shooting from their eyes) and, for a smaller subset, their self-care habits (some Bitcoin maxis only eat meat; others won’t use seed oils, wear sunscreen, ice their injuries, or touch receipts). Across the forums, I could not discern any unified politics other than a shared certainty that the government and wealthy elites are keeping the little guy down.

Reporting on financial markets tends toward extremes. There is the hopelessly mystifying description of market movements, in which byzantine concepts are compressed into small units of abstract language, and then there are the individual stories. In reports on the crypto markets, these stories generally feature people during a bull run getting rich through dumb luck or getting rich and then losing it all. Lurking in these groups provides a third angle. Here are people with complex lives and distinct needs and desires, battling their emotions  –  their greed and, just as important, their fear  –  through buying and selling. These are not, for the most part, wealthy people intent on obtaining more wealth. They are people trying to teach themselves how to get ahead in ways they believe were previously foreclosed to them. They call one another “fam”, cheering on those who make a winning trade and commiserating with those who get “rekt”, as if they aren’t all opponents on the trading battleground.

The more time I spent in the cryptosphere, the more I came to see it as a place where all our economic ills are refracted.

When I started thinking about crypto, in late summer 2021, I came to the discourse with a set of preconceptions about what I would find. The lofty vision of a transparent and fair financial system had mostly given way to the public worship of the appetites. Talk about crypto’s “radical potential”, whatever the politics, had been replaced by a caricature of Silicon Valley hype men and gym rats who liked to pose in front of Italian luxury sports cars and post closeups of their Rolexes. (A good day in crypto can equal a year’s worth of returns on the stock market.) Most of what I’d gleaned about this part of the cryptosphere I had absorbed ambiently from the internet or the news.

I quickly came to understand that cryptocurrency is a term no longer precise enough to describe the array of projects under its umbrella. It’s more than Bitcoin and ether and the occasional meme coin: it’s thousands of projects with corresponding tokens, most of them unrelated to the ambition of replacing the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In simplified terms, each project is built on a blockchain, what the cryptosphere calls a “settlement layer” or “layer 1.” Ethereum is a layer 1; so are Terra, Avalanche, Solana and Cosmos, among others. Each layer 1 has its own native currency or token, which is used to pay for conducting transactions in its ecosystem. There are two main ways to access these tokens: on centralised exchanges, like the ones day traders use for foreign exchange or stocks, or on the blockchain itself, using a decentralised exchange.

Every token has its own “community” of loyal holders who congregate in project-specific Discord or Telegram channels to talk about the road map, to ask questions, or, as often happens, to complain about the price (“Why is price going down? Any news?”). Admins serve as the bridge between the project team and the community and share updates. For some projects, community support can resemble something like religious faith, insofar as the devotion on display seems incommensurate with the project’s outputs. Imagine an Amazon-run Telegram channel where thousands of Amazon stockholders gather to make friends, cheer on the launch of a new service, or squawk at company reps when they aren’t responsive enough. You can’t. It would never happen. But it happens here, in crypto.

I looked around these online spaces and found that every token, every project, was at the mercy of the hype cycle, or what people in the cryptosphere genteelly call “narratives”. Use value was merely incidental. The hype for the final third of 2021 hinged largely on NFTs; on projects with even a remote connection to the words “metaverse” and “gaming”; on layer 1s; and on a series of community-owned decentralised finance applications, known as DeFi 2.0. Apart from trading, the main strategy people rely on to make money is to identify the newest hype, get in early, and then pivot to the next, ahead of the herd. If you study the charts, you can pretty much watch the money move en masse from one speculative focus to the next.

It’s influencers (who else?) who make the hype go round. A few of them are people with genuine skill and knowledge, or “OGs” who traded through at least one of the previous bull runs and over time built followings through displays of wisdom about how to grow a portfolio and trade the charts. Some even produce free educational content and preach the gospel of risk management (eg never risk more than 1% of your portfolio). But no small number appear to be marketers paid to push a given token on their followers. They buy the token at low prices  –  or are given an allocation as payment  – then promote the token once the price is inflated. When their followers buy the token, it gives them the opportunity to exit their position at these higher prices (every seller needs a buyer). They use Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and some have private Telegram and Discord channels. If you’re new, it’s not always easy to ferret out the people who are mostly good-intentioned from those who have no shame. But the charlatans tend to give themselves away by posting a lot of “hopium” (“#bitcoin rewards those who are patient”, “I hope all 950,000+ of my Twitter followers become #crypto millionaires in 2022!”).

There are outright scams, too, among all the legitimate projects. It’s the norm for developers to remain anonymous, and anyone can easily spin up a token and corresponding liquidity pool to make it available on a decentralised exchange. The creators of the play-to-earn game Squid Game borrowed from the hit Netflix series its name and design scheme  –  and also its winner-takes-all denouement. Buyers of the $SQUID token found it was nearly impossible to sell, and after the price shot up 110,000% in the span of about a week, the creators pulled the rug out from under the project, removing its liquidity and making off with around $3.36m. Tweet anything containing the words MetaMask or Trust Wallet, the names of two widely used crypto wallets, and phishing bots unfailingly turn up posing as support staff. After luring the unsuspecting into their DMs and convincing them to give up their seed phrase (a kind of password), scammers immediately use it to drain the wallet of funds.

All this I expected to find. What I did not expect to find in this corner of the cryptosphere was an overwhelming number of seemingly ordinary people of all ages  – some still teenagers, others parents of small children or caregivers to older family members  –  desperate to make money to get by. These were not the people I imagined seated behind a multiscreen trading setup or moving assets around an investment portfolio. Many were here, trying to make money in crypto, because they felt they had no other choice. People struggling financially, who despise their jobs, who feel the system is rigged and there is no way out. People whose country has been at war for years and want to leave, or who have left and want to help family members who stayed behind. From crypto they draw optimism for the future, the possibility that their lives could change, or that they