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, hotel rooms full of money in Hong Kong and a secret beachside mansion on Koh Samui.
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At the centre of it all is ‘Cryptoqueen’ Ruja Ignatova, whose persona fuses Anna Delvey’s Rich Mystery European with Elizabeth Holmes’s Machiavellian girlboss. She’s a dead-eyed prophet, a charismatic preacher, so much that when we learn of the existence of the OneLight ministry in Uganda, a OneCoin church promoting “a unique blend of crypto prosperity gospel and Pentecostalism”, this bizarre turn hardly comes as a surprise.
That Ignatova was able to abscond with debts of roughly $100 billion ($40 billion more than Bernie Madoff incurred) speaks to the enduring power of technology to seduce even as it confuses. While Peak ICO is a thing of the past, technologies including NFTs, crypto games and exchanges all continue to be plagued by cybercrime. OneCoin itself endures to this day, despite criminal charges although the paltry €5,000 reward for revealing Ignatova’s whereabouts mentioned in the book is now $100,000 after she was added to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list last week. It’s a depressing reality that people will continue to lose money this way; one can only hope this shocking, compulsively readable story serves as a cautionary tale.
