I Wrote a Play About Crypto’s Outlaws; the Sequel Had to Be About Power

I spent a decade reporting on crypto. I saw the epic runups, the catastrophic collapses, the FOMO, the rug-pulls, the winters, the summers, the NFT parties in Miami and all the ballroom messiahs. At CoinDesk, where I was managing editor, our newsroom broke the balance-sheet story that brought down FTX, then one of the world's biggest crypto exchanges. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, got 25 years.

By 2023, after another market crash, I’d seen enough crypto drama to think about writing my own. The storylines of crypto seemed eminently dramatic: heroes, villains, power conflict, big themes in finance, tech and much more. I’d written a lot of headlines. I wanted to think about what it felt like to be a person in the room. Certain details from the FTX scandal intrigued me. For instance: What kind of family dynamics drove Sam to commit an $8 billion fraud?

Happenstance opened at the Kraine Theater in New York, in October 2024. It was the first Bitcoin play. Our hero, Charlie Schwagg, shared some characteristics with Charlie Shrem, the Bitcoin pioneer who spent time (2015-16) in federal prison for aiding unlicensed money transmission linked to Silk Road, the dark web drug marketplace. Shrem had lived not far from me in downtown New York and been involved in a nightclub nearby. Charlie's mother (Barbara Schwagg) owed something to Barbara Fried, Sam Bankman-Fried's mother and a zealous philanthropist in her own right. The play followed Charlie through his last hours of freedom, with a family wanting him to escape and his girlfriend pushing him to a spiritual path.