"In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked--but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named "digital asset"? As investigative reporter Zeke Faux observed this frenzy, he had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity--with a dash of FOMO--would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world's new financial machinery. Faux's investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine year old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires. In Number Go Up, he follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to "ApeFest," an elite party headlined by Snopp Dog, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. An in an astonishing development, a spam text leads him to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring. When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, Faux brings readers inside SBF's penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Zeke Faux the accolade "our great poet of crime" (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion"--Provided by publisher.

Prologue -- "I am freaking Nostradamus!" -- Number go up technology -- Doula for creation -- The plastic surgeon -- Getting hilariously rich -- Cat and mouse tricks -- "A thin crust of ice" -- The name's Chalopin. Jean Chalopin. -- Crypto pirates -- Imagine a Robin Hood thing -- "Let's get weird" -- "Click, click, click, make money, make money" -- Play to earn -- Ponzinomics -- All my apes gone -- It's community, bro -- Blorps and fleezels -- Pig butchering -- "We have freedom" -- No acceptamos bitcoin -- Honey is better -- Assets are not fine -- Inside the orchid -- Epilogue.