We only recently emerged from the heyday of the ‘shitcoin’, a brief, heady period in which hundreds of cryptocurrencies were launched, fuelled by a belief that blockchain could solve almost any problem. Many of these initiatives turned out to be scams. Among them, OneCoin was the biggest scam of all.
The Missing Cryptoqueen is a gripping portrait of that time, the fourth book from Jamie Bartlett, journalist and host of the BBC podcast of the same name. It follows the rise and ignominious fall of Dr Ruja Ignatova, founder of OneCoin, a Ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme and fake cryptocurrency rolled into one.
Founded in Bulgaria in 2015, OneCoin promised ‘financial revolution’ through a multi-level marketing scheme, asking followers to sell the currency to family and friends to create endless downlines. It preyed on, in Bartlett’s words, ‘one of the most powerful of all human irrationalities’; the willingness to believe in a future payday.
At over 300 pages, The Missing Cryptoqueen pulls off the feat of not only explaining this labyrinthine tech underworld but making it outrageously entertaining. It’s a human story, populated with the kind of gaudy crooks, ambitious crackpots and tragically hopeful, low-status hustlers we’d expect from a Coen brothers comedy. There are gun-toting Hells Angels, Bulgarian supermodels, and a Dubai-based master criminal known as ‘the Cocaine King’. There are Vanuatuan currency exchanges, Maltese casinos, Irish shell companies,…
