This book is wild. I ordered it when it came out a couple of days ago, and finished it already. If everything in it is true, then it is very very scary and the world of crypto is even worse than I thought.
The book starts out with the narrator (the author) joining the team of a crypto project, and outlines in detail all the fraudulent activities which take place when new crypto tokens go on sale. Donoghue's token, which he calls Portent Protocol in the book, gets promoted by armies of paid influencers on social media, who lure their followers in with the promise of "generational wealth" if they buy the coin. The project also bribes journalists to write favourable articles it, and the team greases the palms of the "auditors" who are supposed to make sure that the technology works and the project / token won't get hacked when it launches (this was VERY alarming - it's like paying off KPMG or an accountant to lie and say that a company's financials are all in order when they're not).
The token pumps 100X on the day it launches, but problems arise - the team used an "anti-bot protocol" to stop trading bots coming in as soon as it launched and buying up all the tokens, which would've pissed off all the thousands of investors who wanted to buy it after hearing about it from influencers, media articles, etc. But something went wrong, and all the ordinary investors who bought it weren't able to sell. They all assumed they had been scammed, so once the problem got fixed everyone rushed to sell. Realising that the reputation of the project wouldn't recover, Donoghue and his colleagues set up a marketing agency to help other projects market their tokens, which is where things get properly insane.
They start working with huge sports teams, celebrities, trading platforms, and just about everyone who was rushing to get in on the crypto goldrush back in 2021. I won't spoil the whole book, but the size and scale of scams and cons which started taking place, and the people at the centre of these, was truly insane. Donoghue then goes into the more well-known collapses - Luna and FTX - but approaches these from quite original angles, and tells stories that I hadn't seen anywhere else before.
All in all, can't recommend this book enough. I've read a lot of other books critical of crypto (being a sceptic myself), but Donoghue's hits different - it's written by someone who used to work in the industry, and that shows. It has a greater level of insight than books like Easy Money, and whereas Number Go Up was good from the outsider journalist perspective, Crypto Confidential goes into the real nitty gritty aspects of what it was like running a crypto project, how the scams are actually pulled off, and tells stories which haven't been in the press before.
Donoghue isn't the author's real name - supposedly he changed it for legal reasons, which given everything the book goes into isn't that surprising - so if everything he says is actually true, it's one of the most eye-opening accounts of crypto I've read. But regardless, it's a great read - darkly funny, and very engaging. A bit like reading The Big Short or Wolf Of Wall Street, but it's crypto so all a lot more ludicrous.
Hope everyone likes it as much as I did!
