On an April afternoon in 2011, a twenty-seven-year-old tech entrepreneur named Bradford Stephens arrived at a stucco bungalow near the canals of Venice, California. He had recently started a new data-analytics company, and had come to speak with a coder named Brandon Smietana, whom he hoped would get involved. Stephens had already met Smietana online, where he uses the handle Synth, and where he often debated minute points about math and programming. When Stephens and Ryan Rawson, an employee who tagged along, arrived, Smietana invited them into a carpeted den. A computer sat on a table, its casings removed to reveal a tangle of circuits; a sleeping bag lay on a sofa. Smietana was in his early twenties, with dark hair and a youthful face. Rawson told me, “He had the air of this mad scientist couch surfing.” Stephens pitched his new company, but got no traction. Smietana had turned his attention to a new technology: cryptocurrency. “The only people who have to work for money are the people who cannot create it or print it out of thin air,” he told them.
The first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin—released in 2009 by an anonymous programmer (or a group of them) called Satoshi Nakamoto—was a feat of computational brilliance. A bitcoin is an abstract unit of value that people track and spend with digital wallets. When someone contributes her computer’s power to process Bitcoin transactions, the computer also races to solve an equation, a process called “mining.” Each solution that meets certain criteria mints new coins. The number created decreases by half every four years or so—an event known as the Halvening—which keeps the supply limited, guarding against inflation. The whole economy is maintained on a blockchain, a shared ledger that keeps a tally of every Bitcoin transaction. As miners add transactions, the Bitcoin software coördinates and finalizes their contributions, making the ledger transparent and unchangeable and the system nearly impossible for governments to shut down.
But the technology has a flaw: as more people use it, transactions become slower and more expensive. The average transaction fee fluctuates wildly; one day last week, it was two dollars and thirty-three cents, making it more expensive than any major credit card for everyday purchases. The pursuit of a better Bitcoin quickly became a full-blown academic field, with its own conferences, university courses, and peer-reviewed journals. But, as Smietana explained over the next few years to anyone who would listen, he had the solution. He was designing a cryptocurrency that could be sent around the world instantaneously, for next to nothing. He called it Skycoin.
He was going to use this currency, he said, to create a decentralized version of the Internet, called Skywire. He planned to build a large mesh network, a system that allows people to use special Internet routers to share bandwidth with their neighbors. With enough members, a network can bypass service providers, making it harder for corporations and governments to surveil Internet use. But it’s difficult to retain volunteers. “A community network really needs density before it is useful,” Brian Hall, of NYC Mesh, the largest community network in the U.S., wrote in a blog post. “It can be a chicken and egg problem.” Smietana’s project proposed a different way to attract people: pay them. His customers would share bandwidth using routers called Skyminers, and get paid for their service in Skycoin. He envisioned a new cryptocurrency spent over a community-owned Internet, calling it “the last step to fulfilling Satoshi’s mission.”
Stephens left his first meeting with Smietana believing that he could be destined for greatness. Skycoin launched publicly two years later, in 2013. The following year, Stephens attended a party at Smietana’s new place, an unrenovated warehouse just south of L.A. Someone had painted the walls with images of horned monsters. “It was very Burning Man meets H. P. Lovecraft,” Stephens told me. Stephens’s friend Baron Chat, a photographer who attended, said, of Smietana, “He seemed to be receiving his signal from a different station than everyone else.” According to Stephens, Smietana asked him to join the fledgling project, but he demurred. (Smietana said he doesn’t remember seeing Stephens at the party.)
The first cryptocurrency boom arrived in 2017. “Several investors I knew, and a lot of my friends, started pivoting from angel investing to putting money in crypto and seeing insane returns,” Stephens told me. Skycoin had a “token sale”—a sort of I.P.O. for cryptocurrencies—and was listed on two small exchanges. By the end of 2017, its price had gone from a little more than a dollar per coin to about fifty dollars per coin. That December, while Stephens was on vacation with his wife in Japan, Smietana messaged him with another chance to get involved. It seemed like an opportunity to work on something revolutionary. But he also thought, Everybody else is getting rich off crypto, so why not me? He said that he later told Smietana, “I’m going to need 50K up front and I gotta hire a team.” After a couple days, he checked his Bitcoin wallet and found fifty thousand dollars sitting in it. “I’m, like, ‘I guess I’m hired,’ ” he said. (Smietana denies sending the money, though he had said he would do so in texts, and there’s a record of such a transaction on the Bitcoin ledger.) Before leaving Kyoto, he and his wife had visited a shrine to Inari, the Shinto god of rice, where they left offerings and made wishes. His wife wished for the health of her father, who was battling cancer. “I asked for wealth and adventure,” Stephens told me. “And I got one of those.”
In the past decade, a shift has occurred in the way that cryptocurrencies are distributed. Satoshi put bitcoins into circulation through a reward system: the more computing power you contribute, the more coins you can mint. Some early adopters paid their rent simply through mining. Around 2012, though, people began devising blockchains that could be used for more ambitious applications: supply chains with real-time geolocation, for example, or patient-controlled medical records. Such projects required capital, compelling founders to experiment with less democratic ways to distribute coins. In 2013, J. R. Willett, the founder of Mastercoin, invented the “initial coin offering,” or I.C.O., the first token sale: developers partially pre-mined their tokens and then sold them off to raise money. Michael Terpin, who has managed two hundred such token sales, and who handled public relations for Skycoin, told me that the scheme empowers entrepreneurs. “Somebody who had an innovative product could sell directly, prior to it being built, to an audience of enthusiasts,” he said, without having to “give up a third of the company.”
A frenzy followed a few years later. Since 2017, hundreds of projects have announced token sales. One of the most lucrative, EOS, raised about three and a half billion dollars in a yearlong I.C.O. Many projects amassed funds even before their blockchains or applications existed; some prepared assiduously, but others merely threw together a Web site, a list of advisers (sometimes without their knowledge), and some semblance of a technical paper (sometimes plagiarized). “A playbook really emerged for how to set up a legitimate-looking I.C.O.,” Matt Chwierut, the head of research at Smith & Crown, a blockchain research firm, told me.
In 2018, I attended the North American Bitcoin Conference, in Miami. On the main stage, representatives from companies with unpronounceable names riled up the crowds. Downstairs, an arcade of booths hawked every kind of blockchain project: smart glasses, cargo robots, refugee-identity documents. At a booth for a group claiming to build a volunteer emergency-services network, I asked why the endeavor required a coin. The attendant told me to come back later when someone more technical would be arriving.
Because bitcoin mining is regulated by algorithms, everyone, in theory, has a fair chance of getting new coins. But, to receive pre-mined coins in a token sale, you often have to buy publicly at the sale price or else negotiate a deal behind the scenes. “A lot of coins were being sold on the side and in secret,” Josh, a major cryptocurrency investor—who eventually bought into Skycoin, and requested that I use only his first name, out of concern for his safety regarding another matter—told me. “You’ll do special deals with people if they give you three or four or five million dollars up front.” This created a sense that making your fortune required being in the right room to get the right tip.
On the second night of the conference, I went to a strip club for an after-party, where flashing your badge got you a crypto-inspired cocktail. (I ordered a Satoshi Sour.) Guests exchanged advice, sure that they were getting the best inside information. But a few hours later a friend whisked me off to a more exclusive party, thrown at a beachside bar by Patrick Byrne, the former C.E.O. of Overstock. (Byrne stepped down in 2019, after it was revealed that he had had an affair with the Russian agent Maria Butina.) The attendees were celebrating the hundred-million-dollar token sale of Byrne’s trading platform, TZero, which he said was going to “drag Wall Street behind the barn, kill it with an axe, and re-create it on blockchain.” There were giant platters of sushi and oysters; the rapper Flo Rida pulled Byrne up onto the bar for a sing-along. Guests exchanged invites to exclusive chat rooms on Telegram, an app favored by coin enthusiasts. I turned to a man next to me and asked what had brought him to the party. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together and shouted, “Making money.”
The employment structure at Skycoin was loose, and Stephens joined without a contract. “Here I was, a guy used to wrangling hundred-page venture-capital contracts, and I’m joining a company with no last names and barely any first names,” Stephens said. Smietana, who by then was living in Shanghai, had pre-mined a hundred million coins, which were scheduled for circulation. Skyminer routers were just starting to ship, but sales had already outstripped production. Smietana estimated that operators who used Skyminers could make between fifteen thousand and forty-five thousand dollars a month. Most coinholders I spoke to were young men around the world—medical students, craftsmen, 3-D animators—who believed in the project. In chat rooms, Smietana’s followers addressed him with reverence. “We all are in honor to speak with synth,” a user called Anosis wrote. “It’s like having a chance to talk to Satoshi.”
Although Stephens studied computer science in college, he admitted that, when he started working with Skycoin, he “hardly knew anything about crypto.” He was told to handle marketing, and assembled a team composed mostly of friends and former associates. (Smietana now claims that he contracted a marketing company that Stephens ran, not Stephens himself.) But he soon realized that word about the project was already spreading. Large investors recruited in their own circles, and smaller coinholders hyped Skycoin on social media. At one point, Skycoin advertised a bounty program that promised users coins in exchange for promotional activities, such as writing blog posts and creating YouTube videos. One user-made video, titled “Skycoin – To the Moon,” featured footage of a shuttle blasting off next to a chart of Skycoin’s market value, interspersed with a closeup of glossy lips and the words “YOU COMIN’?” People who proved their worth on Telegram often got pulled up the ranks. “I started to spend 90 hours a week in the chat room,” a user called Sudo, who became one of Skycoin’s Telegram channel moderators, and who refused to tell me his name, messaged me. “They seen how active I was and offered me a job.”
By early January, 2018, the total estimated value of pre-mined Skycoins had reached almost five billion dollars. Smietana sent representatives to conferences in New York, Lisbon, San Francisco, and Singapore, and arranged a retreat in Mauritius. A former marketing contractor, who requested anonymity out of fear of harassment, recalled that Smietana could spend lavishly on the people who worked with Skycoin, in one case paying for cryotherapy, vitamin injections, thousand-dollar steak dinners, and a twelve-thousand-dollar trip to the Esalen Institute. “Dude was very liberal with his spending and could be very generous,” the marketing contractor said. The team posted a video of a yacht party, and thundered around in Ferraris. In New York, Skycoin reps cruised in a helicopter to grab footage of a Skyminer held over Manhattan’s skyline.
That month, Stephens flew to Las Vegas to speak on a panel at the CoinAgenda summit. He wasn’t up to speed on the technical aspects of Skycoin yet, but he held a Skyminer over his head and said, “You all are the first to see the new Internet!” On the first day of the conference, Smietana sent Stephens a voice memo with an urgent request. He was hoping to get Skycoin listed on Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which could help secure its legitimacy. During the I.C.O. boom, it was common for projects to pay a “listing fee” in order to be included on an exchange. (Binance claims that it chooses projects based solely on “strict security, legal, and regulatory compliance standards.” In 2018, facing pressure, it announced that it would donate its listing fees to charity.) Smietana said that he had paid Binance executives seven and a half million dollars but that they hadn’t followed through. (Binance confirmed that Skycoin paid it a fifty thousand Skycoins to spend on “promotion,” which were worth seven and a half million at the coin’s peak.) Smietana told Stephens to entertain the executives, to sweeten the deal. Stephens planned a party in a penthouse suite at the Bellagio. Smietana gave explicit instructions via voice messages: “You have to buy prostitutes for the people at Binance,” he said. “Get them, like, three girls each.” (Smietana denies any involvement in the party, and claims that his voice messages about it were “either a joke or a deep fake but probably a deep fake.”)
That night, Stephens and Baron Chat, who had also started working on Skycoin’s marketing, along with Catherine Byerly, another member of the team, sat in the hotel suite, with champagne on ice. Six escorts arrived at nine, and the employees instructed them to make the Binance executives feel like “rock stars.” “To them, I was this, like, stereotypical businesswoman in an Ann Taylor dress,” Byerly said. “But inside I’m thinking, How did my decisions lead me here?” Chat said, “It felt almost like you were in the process of living out some bizarre reality that sometimes you see in the movies. The weird excess . . . Crazy shit happens when you have a corporate account and a green light.” By ten o’clock, the executives hadn’t shown up, and Stephens began to worry that he’d lost the deal. He couldn’t reach Smietana, so he frantically called the event organizers. They explained that not only had no Binance reps showed up at the conference—they weren’t even on the registration list. (A spokesperson at Binance told me that the company neither requested nor knew about the party.) “That’s when I started taking anything Brandon said with a grain of salt,” Stephens told me. Still, he decided that, “if this is going to be weird, I’m going to make it memorable weird.” Some of the escorts took their pay and left; the rest drank champagne and played Cards Against Humanity with the group into the morning.
When Stephens returned from Las Vegas, he set about mapping Skycoin’s progress. One of the company’s main selling points was Obelisk, an algorithm that allowed it to send coins cheaply and quickly. On Telegram, Smietana insisted that everything that came before was “obsolete and primitive.” He boasted that Obelisk was written by Houwu Chen, a developer who had worked on Ethereum, the second-most popular cryptocurrency platform. He posted an academic paper written by Chen on the Skycoin Web site, claiming that it was a Skycoin white paper. But when Stephens reached out to Chen, he got no response. “We kept trying to chase people down to ask details, and it was slowly revealed it just . . . didn’t exist,” he told me. In a later discussion about technical details, a Skycoin “community manager” told coinholders that “it’s too advanced to share” and that the company “can’t trust the public with it.” When pressed, Smietana wrote, of Chen, “He is a recluse, I doubt anyone can contact him or he would respond.” Smietana eventually told me that Chen had taken a payment of a million Skycoins for his work on the white paper and then left the project. (Chen declined to comment, saying, “Just don’t put my name in the article. That’s my statement.”) Stephens discovered that Obelisk had never been implemented. (Smietana now acknowledges this, but claims that the project has published some of Obelisk’s code and used it in simulations.)
Skycoin’s payments were fast, but only because transactions were processed on a single server, rather than on a decentralized network of computers. The server sat in the Shanghai office of Scott Freeman, the C.E.O. of the C2CX cryptocurrency exchange. This also meant that, if Smietana wanted to, he could freeze transactions. “The big thing about a blockchain is it’s supposed to be decentralized, and no single entity is supposed to be able to change it,” Freeman told me. He added, of Skycoin’s setup, “In a way, it makes you into a fraud.” (Smietana claims that his power to freeze transactions was designed as a security measure.) Freeman said that he nagged Smietana about implementing Obelisk but that Smietana told him, “People don’t really care. It’s not worth it. We should spend our resources on other things.” (Smietana denies this.)
Skycoin’s Web site claimed that multiple payments were scrambled together to provide extra privacy, but this feature was never implemented in the Skycoin wallet. The pre-mined coins sat in virtual wallets under Smietana’s sole control. (When pressed, Smietana claimed that he shared control of the coins with a secret group of advisers, but refused to give me their names.) When Stephens asked to see Skycoin’s accounting books, Smietana explained that his girlfriend, Sarah, was in charge. Sarah told Stephens that the accounting was a work in progress. (Smietana denies directing Stephens to Sarah, and she denies being in charge of the project’s accounting.) Everything seemed haphazard. Stephens was once paid from a bank account in Mauritius registered under a different name; many employees were paid in bitcoin or Skycoin.
In early February, 2018, a month after the CoinAgenda conference, Stephens booked a trip to Shanghai to see Smietana, determined to bring some order to Skycoin. One night, he had dinner with Smietana and members of a Chinese marketing team that Smietana had hired, at a steak house in Xuhui. As the dinner began, Smietana rose from his chair and launched into a rambling diatribe of conspiracy theories. For hours, he catalogued the hidden crimes of a class of global élites who controlled citizens through virtual reality, medical marijuana, and pornography. At some point, Stephens started recording Smietana on his phone. “We want to feminize the peasant population to make them more docile,” Smietana says. “It’s so they don’t revolt.”
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