Intelligencer - The Crypto World Has a New Villain

I had no idea who Barry Silbert was or anything until after November 16, 2022,” Eric Asquith told me. That date was when he was pretty sure he had lost his family’s savings of $1,052,000. Asquith took what he thought was the sober route into crypto. He didn’t buy bitcoin or other meme tokens. Instead, earlier that year, he moved over cash from his business — just a little at first, then more — and converted it into digital currencies he thought were as good as cash. The digital coins were called GUSD, and each was worth exactly $1 because the company that minted them — Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’s crypto exchange, Gemini— backed each one with real money and assets. Gemini seemed different from the rest of the market with big ads that said “Crypto Without Chaos” and “The Revolution Needs Rules.” Asquith was so cautious that he didn’t even trade — he just put his million bucks into a kind of savings account called Earn, which paid him about 5.5 percent a year — far higher than what major banks were offering at the time. He wasn’t alone. Among the hundreds of thousands of other Earn customers were a grandmother who invested her entire life savings and a man saving his money for a long-needed surgery.

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