CULT of the CRYPTO QUEEN
Picture a drab London conference centre in July 2016 where finance industry workers in grey and brown suits were starting to wilt after a day of presentations. Then, a woman who looked like European royalty was beamed into the room to declare that a revolution was coming. With her winged eyeliner, voluminous hair and structured black couture, Dr Ruja Ignatova embodied the glamour and success she was promising to those who invested in her exciting new digital currency.
The delegates straightened up, their attention well and truly captured. The 36-year-old entrepreneur and self-proclaimed visionary glittered with jewels as she began to weave her golden lie. “OneCoin is actually a very interesting product. It is ethical. It is interest free, and it gives fair access [for] everyone out there to cryptocurrency,” she told the room in her gentle, hypnotic voice.
“OneCoin’s strategy always was to create a cryptocurrency for the people – people like you and me who don’t have a lot of IT knowledge, who don’t want to make huge investments in hardware to mine coins, but who want to participate in innovation, and who want to be part of something new and exciting.”
Her pitch was perfectly timed. The hype around a mysterious new form of currency known as crypto was approaching its nadir. Bitcoin’s value had gone from less than a cent in 2009 to US$1000 in 2014. Most people didn’t understand how this new digital money worked, but they had watched early adopters become millionaires overnight, and they wanted in on the next crypto boom.
“The most important thing is that fear ofJamie Bartlett. “They were so scared other people had gotten rich just by getting in early to Bitcoin and they wanted to change their lives.”
