4 ideas
Tether issued billions of dollar-pegged tokens that traders used as chips across crypto exchanges, yet its backing was opaque and poorly audited. If new tokens can be minted without equivalent dollars coming in, the issuer can inflate trading volume and prop up prices across the whole market. That makes the stablecoin a systemic point of failure disguised as plumbing.
Most crypto tokens and NFTs have no use beyond being resold, so their value depends entirely on new buyers arriving at higher prices. Seen this way, the industry's technical jargon and utopian mission statements are marketing for a greater-fool game. Once the inflow of new money stops, prices collapse, because nothing underneath generates returns.
Axie Infinity promised players in the Philippines income for breeding and battling digital creatures. The earnings were paid in tokens whose value came from new players buying in to start playing. When recruitment slowed, the token crashed and the 'jobs' disappeared. It shows how an economy that looks productive can be funded only by its next entrants.
Faux traced romance-investment scams, in which strangers build trust over weeks and then steer victims to fake crypto trading platforms, back to compounds in Cambodia. Trafficked workers there are forced to run the scripts under threat of violence.