The more I read about the FTX bankruptcy and its impact on the cryptocurrency market, the better I understand what happens when the controls that society should impose on companies fail miserably.

What did Sam Bankman-Fried do with FTX and how was it possible that no one saw it coming? Leaving aside the question of how somebody with a name like that could inspire confidence in a business related to banking and the economy in general, the problem was, fundamentally, in a narrative of a successful entrepreneur with a supposed fortune of $16 billion, raising funds from hundreds of thousands of people, spending lavishly on PR, media advertising and lobbying politicians, and then covering the hole with a corporate structure in the Bahamas and a cryptocurrency, the FTT, of his own creation.

What was FTT? Basically, a native token created by FTX to try to encourage users of the exchange to leave their money in the company, with promises of additional returns. Similar mechanism exist in the crypto world, but they are supposed to be used responsibly, and not as the foundations for a house of cards. In practice, it should remind us of the cryptocurrency maxim, “not your keys, not your coins”, and how if you leave your coins in a centralized service, you face risk, whether it is hacking, as in the case of Mt. Gox, or “creative accounting”, as in Terraform Labs or FTX.

Sam Bankman-Fried was the American Dream writ large: one of those success stories that the media love, in large part because people like him have vast advertising budgets. Even now, after the bankruptcy, there are those who warn that the coverage by the media in which Bankman-Fried spent a lot of money is benevolent, given that he committed fraud on a massive scale and then tried to make off with the cash. During the season in which our protagonist managed to tell his story and make the covers of Fortune and Forbes, which illustrate this article, the media peddled a narrative of a young achiever, a financial hero, when in reality he was a scoundrel surrounded by a team of criminals, one of whom went by the name of Sam Trabucco (a “trabuco” was typically the weapon of choice for Spanish “bandoleros”).

How much responsibility should the media accept for swallowing Bankman-Fried’s lies, and as a result of his PR, he ends up being able to sit down and interview the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, while, in the process, conning thousands of people to buy into his company? No one, not even Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on whose watch the whole scam was set up, seemed able to see what was going on. We might even ask what role Bankman-Fried’s generous donations to the Democratic Party played in all this.

Does the story end with this character declaring bankruptcy and saying, “I fucked up”? Who pays, in a still very poorly regulated world, for the savings of those who decided to invest in cryptocurrencies carried away by FTX’s Super Bowl ad campaigns or his multiple media appearances as a financial wunderkind? What about the loss of credibility, financial damage and reputational issues that accompany each scandal of this kind?

The cryptocurrency stables need thoroughly cleaning out. First, we are talking about the reinvention of money to redefine it as something whose value does not depend on any government, rather than a get-rich-quick scheme. Second, we are talking about a model whose value lies in decentralization, and therefore, if you centralize it in something that looks like an old-fashioned bank, you are losing that proposition and raising your risk level (it can’t be said too often: “not your keys, not your coins”). Third, it is reasonable to think that schemes will emerge to control some of the risks, and in fact, the community, some exchanges and Vitalik Buterin himself have quickly started working on protocols that allow anyone to check that the site where their money is located has funds to cover them.

But beyond all that, it is worth remembering that, as ever, when something seems too good to be true it usually is. Cryptocurrencies are not a way to become rich overnight, but models on which the future of money, as well as the web, will be based. Regardless of scandals like FTX, we are going to see blockchains, wallets, cryptocurrencies and tokens everywhere, very soon. Understanding how all this works is essential, not because it will open the doors to instant wealth, but because it will help navigate the future.