Featured · Crypto Wreckage
The Crypto Crash Hall of Shame — When 18 Months Replaces 30 Years
“They printed money on trust, returned it as memes, then asked for the trust back.”
A trad-finance founder takes thirty years to compound up to Primal and three to fall to the Abyss — see Hui Ka Yan for the slowest-motion version on file. Crypto compressed the round-trip into roughly eighteen months. Token Genesis Event keynote to indictment, Bahamas penthouse to perp walk. This page is the wreckage.
At a Glance
| Wreck | Peak | Floor | Status (as of 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| FTX / SBF | ~$26B (Oct 2022) | -$8B customer hole | Convicted Nov 2023; 25 years, Mar 2024 |
| Terra / Do Kwon | ~$25B LUNA mcap | ~$40B (LUNA + UST) gone in ~72 hrs | Extradited to US (late 2024); facing charges SDNY; outstanding cases S Korea + Singapore |
| 3AC / Su Zhu + Kyle Davies | ~$10B AUM | ~$0; bankruptcy | Su Zhu: 4 months Singapore (contempt of court, 2023). Kyle Davies: undisclosed; US charges outstanding |
| Celsius / Alex Mashinsky | ~$25B AUM | bankruptcy, Jul 2022 | Convicted on two fraud counts May 2025; sentencing pending |
| Voyager / Stephen Ehrlich | ~$5B claims | bankruptcy, Jul 2022 | FTC civil judgment ~$1.6B (2024, largely suspended); criminal status pending |
FTX (briefly — see the deep dive)
We have a whole page on Sam Bankman-Fried and his $26B-to-em-dash speedrun, so we won’t repeat it. Short version: peak ~$26B in October 2022, Chapter 11 by November 11, indicted in the Bahamas in December, convicted on seven federal counts a year later, sentenced March 2024 to 25 years. ~$8B in commingled customer deposits. Eleven days, top to bottom — the Abyss at frame rate.
Terra / Luna — Do Kwon
In May 2022, the “algorithmic stablecoin” UST and its sister token LUNA shed roughly $40 billion in market cap in seventy-two hours. The pitch deck was elegant: UST holds a $1 peg by minting and burning LUNA. Once the peg slipped, the mechanism that defended it printed LUNA into infinity. The death spiral worked exactly as designed. The design was the problem.
Do Kwon — chairman of Terraform Labs, the man tweeting “steady lads” on the way down — was arrested in Montenegro in March 2023 carrying forged Costa Rican papers. After almost two years of jurisdictional ping-pong between Seoul and Washington, he was extradited to the United States in late 2024 and is currently facing charges in SDNY for fraud and market manipulation. Outstanding charges remain in South Korea. None of the substantive US fraud trial has run yet. We do not call him convicted; the docket has not.
3AC — Su Zhu and Kyle Davies
Three Arrows Capital was a Singapore-headquartered crypto hedge fund running ~$10 billion AUM at peak, levered into LUNA, GBTC, and any other thing the word “supercycle” could be glued onto. When Terra imploded, the trades imploded with it. By June 2022 the fund was in liquidation. Counterparty losses reportedly exceeded $3 billion, knocking BlockFi, Genesis, and Voyager over on the way down — the contagion the word contagion exists for.
Su Zhu was arrested in Singapore in September 2023 and served four months in jail for contempt of court related to the liquidation; released early 2024. Kyle Davies’s whereabouts have been variously reported as Bali and undisclosed; he has faced no equivalent custodial sentence, and US regulatory charges remain outstanding. Their post-3AC venture, OPNX — an exchange explicitly built to trade claims against their own previously failed fund — itself collapsed in 2024. The genre needed an Onion piece. Reality filed it instead.
Celsius — Alex Mashinsky
Celsius Network was a “crypto bank” whose marketing promised “banks are not your friends” while it ran a balance sheet a regional examiner would have shut on sight. Peak AUM ~$25 billion. In June 2022 it froze withdrawals; by July it was in Chapter 11.
Mashinsky — former CEO, the “unbankyourself” T-shirt guy — was convicted in May 2025 on two counts of fraud by a Manhattan federal jury, including charges tied to the manipulation of CEL, Celsius’s native token. Sentencing remained pending at last published reporting. This is the second crypto CEO criminal conviction post-FTX; it is on the record, and we are happy to use the word.
Voyager — Stephen Ehrlich
Voyager Digital, a Toronto-listed retail crypto broker, had ~$5 billion in customer claims when it filed Chapter 11 in July 2022. The proximate cause was a defaulted ~$650M loan to — predictably — Three Arrows Capital. The deeper cause was that “FDIC-insured” was being implied in marketing the way “wagmi” was being implied on Twitter. The FDIC publicly objected, repeatedly.
Stephen Ehrlich, the former CEO, settled an FTC civil case in 2024 with a roughly $1.6 billion judgment (largely suspended due to inability to pay, with a $1M settlement payment). A parallel CFTC civil action was settled. We are deliberately not characterising any criminal status; consult the live docket. The customers, meanwhile, recovered cents.
(The contagion took BlockFi, Genesis, and a chunk of Gemini Earn down the same drain — same era, same plumbing, smaller blast radii. The 2014 Mt. Gox hack was the genre’s prequel; that prequel’s customers are still being paid out a decade later.)
The Pattern
The trad-finance template — see the founders who lost everything and the debt abyss — runs decades. Crypto compressed it.
The thesis isn’t that crypto is uniquely fraudulent. It’s that the rails were uniquely frictionless. Trad finance has thirty years of audits, settlement delays, and quarterly footnotes between magazine cover and indictment. Crypto removed those — by design, marketed as a feature — and the resulting climb-and-fall asymmetry now writes the speed records on this site. Math is undefeated, on shorter and shorter intervals.
The entry tickets were marketed as “we, the people, taking back finance.” The exit tickets were Patagonia vests with the company logo on them, retail customers staring at frozen withdrawal screens, and a Brioni suit on a perp walk. Same instrument both directions. Only the press release changes.
FAQ
Are all of these people convicted? No. SBF and Mashinsky are. Su Zhu served a short Singapore sentence on a contempt charge, not on the underlying conduct. Do Kwon is facing charges in the US and has outstanding cases in two other jurisdictions; we do not call him convicted because he hasn’t been. Kyle Davies’s and Ehrlich’s situations are in motion. Read the date stamps; this page will age.
Did the customers get their money back? Partial recoveries through bankruptcy estates are ongoing across all five. FTX claims have traded above 100¢ on the dollar in 2024–25 thanks to appreciation of recovered crypto holdings — a result this page entirely declines to celebrate.
Sources
- US Department of Justice — United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried (SDNY, 2023–2024); United States v. Alexander Mashinsky (SDNY, 2025); United States v. Do Kwon (SDNY, ongoing)
- US SEC, FTC, CFTC — civil complaints and settlements: FTX, Terraform Labs, Celsius, Voyager, Ehrlich
- Singapore courts — 3AC liquidation; contempt sentence (2023). Hong Kong / BVI bankruptcy filings — 3AC.
- Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, CoinDesk, The Block — contemporary reporting, 2022–2025
- CoinMarketCap — historical price data: LUNA / UST / FTT / CEL
- globalrank.ing methodology — how we build the ladder
The lights are still on at the Bahamas penthouse. Somebody else lives there now. Same wallpaper, different LLC. The receipts are public record.
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