Welcome to the cryptoverse, where it’s all too simple to lose your money.

The stodgy corporate image of the Metaverse envisioned by Facebook and Microsoft — picture virtual workplaces filled with scary Dorian Gray-like avatars — is nothing like as dystopian as the cryptocurrency-fueled metaverse that exists today.

As my Bloomberg News colleagues recently portrayed, the latter area is the true head-spinner. It’s a location powered by decentralized finance (DeFi), a $100 billion web of largely unregulated businesses that lend and trade cryptocurrency for a charge.

It’s a place where parents worry as their children win real money playing blockchain games like Axie Infinity; a place where virtual museums display art sold by real auction houses for eight-figure sums; a place rife with inflated prices, insider front-running, and a slew of other frauds and forgeries. It’s a place where every exciting financial invention is followed by a hack, rug-pull, or wipeout — the Squid Game token being the most recent example.

The issue today is how much longer this location will remain a Wild West, where real and virtual riches are created and destroyed. Probably not for a long time.

We know from experience that speculative manias fade over time, but norms and standards are never far away from fast-evolving financial technology…