I started covering the crypto industry at Fortune in August 2022, just a couple of months before FTX collapsed. I’ve never experienced a story like it. Sure, tech companies have imploded in spectacular fashion before—just look at Theranos—but FTX was something else. You had the young, idiosyncratic founder who flew too close to the sun, and the investors who turned a blind eye to clear red flags. But FTX was a financial services platform, and its failure meant the evaporation of billions of dollars—real money, not only to VCs, but normal people who trusted the company with their savings. It was the 2008 financial crisis but speedrun by 20-year-olds.
For the past six months, Allie Garfinkle and I have been reporting a story about a startup collapse that eerily echoes FTX, except for the amount of public attention it’s received. Like FTX, Synapse was a red-hot fintech company run by a wunderkind named Sankaet Pathak who wanted to upend financial infrastructure. And like Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s founder, Pathak convinced blue-chip investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, to fund his idea with tens of millions of dollars.
