Not a biography. An explanation.
I did not set out to write a book. I set out to answer a private question: how much of what I kept reading about crypto losses was actually true?
I have worked in banking, in cybersecurity, and in AI engineering — three rooms with three very different views of the same money. What the three rooms had in common was this: the loudest claims, in every direction, came with the least evidence. Crypto was either the future of everything or a scam all the way down, depending on who was paid to say so. Nobody in either crowd would show their arithmetic.
So I started keeping a catalogue. One incident at a time: what happened, what actually failed, where the money went, with a citation for every claim. The catalogue became OnChainAttack — a public, free classification of 650+ documented crypto incidents from 2010 onward, built the way security researchers classify attacks on computer networks. It is open, it is cited, and it will stay free.
Somewhere past the six hundredth incident, I noticed I had stopped being surprised. The exchange support scam was the bank support scam, word for word. The exchange that turned out to be a spreadsheet was the boiler room, a century on. The counterfeit hardware wallet was the ATM skimmer. New rail, old crime — and on the old rail, the same crime was usually harder to see.
That observation would not leave me alone, because I knew exactly who needed it: the person standing at crypto's door, scared, still deciding whether to walk in. On one side, influencers selling the cool life. On the other, headlines announcing that everything is theft. Both crowds have something to sell. Nobody honest was talking to the person who just wanted to know how afraid to be, and of what.
So the book asks the only question I trust: compared to what? Not "is crypto dangerous" — of course it is. Dangerous compared to what, measured how, checked against which public records. Every load-bearing number in the book is in the verification index. If one of them does not check out, say so — corrections are published, with credit.
I do not sell custody, hardware, coins or courses. The research is the point. The book is what the research looked like once it became a story.
DMYTRO CHYSTIAKOV