Bloomberg journalist Zeke Faux set out on an oracle-like mission to chronicle the phenomenon of crypto in 2021, around the time bitcoin and ethereum values were at all-time highs. An investigation that began rooted in cynicism and a decade of writing about scams turned into "Number Go Up," a feat that offers readers an accessible, entertaining, infuriating account of crypto's "wild rise and staggering fall."
"Number Go Up" is a crash course into the wild world of crypto that covers a lot of ground, both topically and geographically. Faux, a self-described "Brooklyn dad with a minivan," trekked across four continents on a two-year journey, landing in places like a yacht party in the Bahamas, a shaved ice cart in El Salvador and an art exhibit in Switzerland.
Faux originally hypothesizes that Tether, a crypto company behind an eponymous stablecoin and the backing for much of the crypto world, is fraudulent. Admittedly, Faux doesn't exactly prove it in the book, but "Number Go Up" works hard to tell a clear story about how $2 trillion dollars in the broader crypto industry went poof, and who was responsible. In 2022, prices of cryptocurrencies plummeted as exchanges went bankrupt, investments disappeared and one of the biggest players in the game, FTX, was shown to be fraudulent.
The magnetism of the book comes from Faux's meticulous descriptions of near-fiction-like encounters and his reactions to them. In a 2021 interview with Alex Mashinsky, the then-CEO of Celsius Network, about the crypto company's business model and its investment in stablecoins, Faux's mounting skepticism bores through as he writes of "trying to keep a straight face." Celsius claimed users could park their crypto at the company and earn high interest rates, even when most savings accounts' rates were near zero.
Faux asked Mashinsky if his claims were too good to be true. "'Somebody is lying,' Mashinsky said. 'Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying.'
"I was pretty sure I knew who was lying, and it wasn't J.P. Morgan," Faux writes. Celsius collapsed a year later, in July 2022.
Personally, I've found that when concepts I'm reporting on aren't making sense, it's usually due to one of two potential explanations. The first, and far more frequent, is there's a key component that I'm missing. It's hard to understand calculus without knowing algebra, for example.
The second, less-common possibility is that something isn't making sense because it fundamentally doesn't make sense.
Faux consistently leads readers to the "this fundamentally doesn't make sense" camp, even when he finds himself literally at sea among crypto "bros" and seemingly everyone is making money on digital currencies. When describing the crypto crash in 2022, he writes, "If you're having trouble following this, that's actually a good sign about your investing instincts."
Despite Faux's overall strong intuition about the fraudulent nature of some crypto businesses, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX who was found guilty for overseeing the most notorious crypto scheme in history, didn't raise any of the journalist's alarms. In fact, "Number Go Up" includes several scenes where the author asks Bankman-Fried for help, advice or perspective. At one point, Bankman-Fried is presumably empathetically explaining that Faux's theory about stablecoins being fraudulent is false. The then-FTX CEO said: "'It's like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, 'Holy shit, this is the world's biggest Ponzi scheme,' right?'"
A chunk of "Number Go Up" recounts Faux's experiences at FTX's Bahamas headquarters, where he saw Bankman-Fried sleep on a beanbag and play a video game while fielding questions from the Economic Club of New York. Bankman-Fried's willingness to answer questions is refreshing, possibly in part because of the irony of his fate. (He was convicted of fraud in November and faces decades in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for March.)
But not all the storylines in "Number Goes Up" have a resolution tied up with a bow. Tether, the company that spurred Faux's investigation, has "stayed alive." In a response to an interview request from Faux, Tether executive Giancarlo Devasini wrote, "'Bees don't waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.'"
While most of Faux's ventures to investigate crypto were so zany they were comical, like zipping around on golf carts or attending ragers with Jimmy Fallon, his encounters with the victims of the industry were sobering.
In a game called "Axie Infinity," players could win a cryptocurrency called Smooth Love Potions, which could then be traded on some crypto exchanges. In the Philippines, Faux speaks to a man named Arthur Lapina, who made the game his career, earning up to $10,000 in one week at its peak in mid-2021. Months later, the price of the coin crashed, and Lapina was left with nothing.
In late 2022, Tether's red flags took Faux to Cambodia, where victims of human trafficking were imprisoned to run scams. The money made from this was often moved using Tether, according to the book.
While the breadth of "Number Go Up" is wide, each chapter hits so much material that occasionally the connections between some of Faux's discoveries can feel a little thin. For example, a lengthy interlude into the land of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, offers a hilarious vignette that includes a tense conversation with Faux's wife and the purchase of a gross-looking, digital ape, but its connection to the more poignant allegations in the book was somewhat elusive.
Still, Faux's tone throughout "Number Go Up" is thrillingly honest, if at times wry. This voice is what pushes the story from being a timeline of facts to a compelling narrative. Early on in his voyage, Faux found that the cult-like enthusiasm for crypto, as world leaders and educated executives waxed poetic about the advantages of bitcoin, made him briefly feel like he was the sucker in the room.
But this self-doubt was short-lived. "From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined."
