Review of Crypto Confidential

I would like to report that Nathaniel Eliason’s (@nateliason) Crypto Confidential is the perfect airplane read (MIA→SFO). It’s a tough test for any book—very few can meet this standard—as it requires that a book be smoothly written and thoroughly engaging, so that your attention hardly wavers.

It doesn’t quite meet the high standard of the 'all-night read' test—a book you start at bedtime and continue reading until you finish. Only about ten books have reached that level for me over the past decade, including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, and, somewhat surprisingly, Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff

Maria Konnikova

. Nonetheless, being a 'perfect plane read' is still an impressively high standard.

Crypto Confidential is set almost entirely between April 2021 and May 2022, the most chaotic period in crypto history. A book like this risks becoming tedious. There are many pitfalls: it could focus solely on money, losing any narrative drive; it might underestimate its audience, forgetting that readers are likely already familiar with key parts of the story; or it could overwhelm readers by diving too deeply into technical details.

Crypto Confidential’s narrator, Nate Eliason, is a sharp and energetic guy figuring out the crypto universe on the fly. He’s not a normal person—clearly very bright, he’s also capable of working 90+ hours a week—and this allows him to go quite deep into the cryptosphere. He’s capable of programming complex web3 projects after just a few months. He has an extreme but not completely reckless risk tolerance, and his starting capital of $5k goes on (no spoilers) quite the ride.

The ups and downs of his fortune, though, are not the great part of this book. The book is a pedagogical wonder, introducing crypto and web3 concepts through short instructional sections that, while they could easily be exhausting, are instead engaging and enlightening. I can’t think of another book that utilizes instructional sidebars so effectively. Eliason also has exquisite pacing, slowing down during the essential human elements of the story, and speeding up in the moments when market moves, up or down, are central.

An important theme of the story centers on the discord between normal human interactions—particularly with his wife and child—and the manic pace of the crypto world. It resonates deeply because it mirrors the same tension we all experience with cell phones, but amplified to an extreme degree by the intensity of crypto. As the author puts it, “Defi devs don’t sleep,” and their friends bring their laptops to lunch dates, lest they miss out on crucial NFT drops.

One of the book’s strengths is that Nathaniel doesn’t seem to care whether we like him or not. A climactic moment involves his decision on whether to hold or sell the tokens from his Web3 project after discovering a crucial piece of information. The tension surrounding this decision—stemming from social pressures on insiders and all holders of Web3 assets to avoid selling—is fascinating. Nathaniel’s savvy approach offers valuable lessons and parallels to be drawn with TradFi. In my view, this is a classic business book, not just a crypto book.