All entries

Startups

• Quibi · $1.75B raised, shut within a year. Premium shows cut into ten-minute chapters, for phones. Nobody had asked for it, and short video was already free.
• Theranos · $9B valuation, on a test that didn't work. A few drops of blood from a finger, hundreds of tests. The machine ran about a dozen.
• WeWork · $47B private valuation. From a $47 billion valuation to Chapter 11 in under five years. Bloomberg

Crypto

• FTX · $8B of customer money lost. An exchange that quietly moved customers' money to its own trading firm, until a run showed it was gone.
• Terra and Luna · $40B wiped out in a week. A stablecoin backed by its sister token. Both fell to near zero in May 2022.
• Mt. Gox · 850,000 bitcoins missing at collapse. It handled most of the world's bitcoin trades, and lost track of 850,000 coins.
• Squid Game token · $3.38M reportedly taken, gone in minutes. You could buy it. You couldn't sell it.
• The DAO · 3.6M ETH drained, a third of the fund. A code bug that split Ethereum in two.
• QuadrigaCX · C$169M shortfall. The founder died, and the exchange's money turned out to be mostly gone already. Ontario Securities Commission
• Bitconnect · ~40% a month, promised. A "trading bot" paying returns no bot could make. The lending platform shut in January 2018. TechCrunch

NFTs

• Frosties · $1.1M raised, abandoned within hours. A sold-out NFT mint, abandoned the same day it sold out.

Games

• Concord · 697 peak players on Steam. Reportedly eight years in development, two weeks on sale, in a genre where the big games are free.
• Axie Infinity · 99.9% fall in its reward token. A game people played for a living, until new players stopped arriving. Then hackers took about $620 million from its bridge.

Events

• Fyre Festival · $26M ordered forfeited, six years in prison. A luxury festival sold with supermodels, delivered with disaster tents and a cheese sandwich.

Trading

• Knight Capital · $460M lost in 45 minutes. A new deploy missed one of eight servers, and a reused flag woke up code that had been dead since 2003.
• Archegos · $10B+ lost by banks. A family office with hidden leverage, and lenders that each saw only their own slice. NBC News
• Silicon Valley Bank · $42B withdrawn in a day. Customers pulled $42 billion in one day, with about $100 billion more queued for the next. CNBC

Creators

• Vine · ~$30M paid by Twitter. It invented the six-second star, then let them leave. Engadget

Hardware

• Juicero · $120M raised, beaten by a hand squeeze. A Wi-Fi juice press that cost $699, for packs you could squeeze yourself.

Side hustles

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