2025 Crypto Park: When Tornado Cash Flows and Candlestick Dreams Collapse

The cryptocurrency industry in 2025 turned into an unhinged carnival of absurdity, where the line between deliberate deception and spectacular failure blurred beyond recognition. From fake deaths orchestrated as exit strategies to hackers becoming victims of their own schemes, this year proved that the crypto “park”—part amusement park, part high-stakes casino—had reached peak ridiculousness. What follows is a retrospective of the moments that defined 2025: a year where even the most outlandish predictions felt conservative.

Identity Theater: Founders Disappearing and Deaths That Never Happened

The year opened with peculiar disappearance acts that tested the credulity of even the most battle-hardened crypto communities. In February, the TGE project’s founder Harold vanished into Myanmar, claiming he’d lost access to his multisignature wallet along with his laptop. Despite this catastrophic scenario, the TGE team announced business as usual—the token launch would proceed without interruption. Whether this was genuine misfortune or an elaborate publicity stunt remains debated within communities, as some observed that the mystery somehow amplified project buzz rather than derailing it.

The real shock came in May when Zerebro co-founder Jeffy Yu took identity fraud to theatrical extremes. A video surfaced showing Yu apparently shooting himself during a live stream—initially dismissed as another developer stunt for attention. Days later, his obituary circulated, and as mourning shifted to confusion, the associated meme token LLJEFFY’s market cap surged past $30 million. The reveal came swiftly: it was all calculated. Yu confessed in a letter to early investors that he’d orchestrated the “fake death exit strategy” to prevent his project’s token from crashing amid personal harassment and online hate. He claimed this fabricated death was the “only way” to engineer an exit without economic destruction. The incident marked the first documented case of a founder weaponizing faked mortality as a market management tool—a new low even for an industry accustomed to novel depravities.

When Hackers Become Hacked: The Tornado Cash Irony

April brought a karmic twist that left observers in genuine disbelief. The zkLend hacker, who’d successfully stolen funds in February, attempted to launder 2,930 ETH through Tornado Cash. In a stunning display of irony, the criminal accidentally clicked a phishing website masquerading as the legitimate service and lost the entire sum—all 2,930 ETH—to site operators. The hacker then sent an on-chain message to zkLend requesting assistance in recovering the stolen funds from the phishing website. zkLend’s security team noted the phishing domain had operated for over five years, complicating attribution. The incident exposed a dark humor in crypto’s ecosystem: sometimes the universe’s justice system works through sheer stupidity.

When Developers Become Detectives: Exposure at Offline Events

In May, the Clanker project announced its separation from core developer proxystudio, citing past misconduct. The deeper revelation proved more absurd: proxystudio was actually Gabagool.eth, an on-chain investigator known for exposing fraud. Yet Gabagool himself had embezzled roughly $350,000 from Velodrome in 2022—a crime only partially remedied through community pressure. Most remarkably, he wasn’t re-exposed through blockchain forensics but rather recognized in person by Velodrome founder Alex Cutler at the FarCon offline conference. The incident highlighted a perverse irony: a detective of on-chain crime had himself been committing it while analyzing others, only to be caught through the most analog means possible—human recognition.

Catastrophic Errors and Wallet Purges

June witnessed institutional incompetence reaching new heights when Alby, a Bitcoin Lightning Network wallet, implemented a policy to automatically drain inactive accounts after 12 months without transaction activity. Users reported their Bitcoin balances simply vanishing. Alby’s terms of service, updated in March 2025, justified this asset confiscation as a mechanism for managing “older Alby accounts created in 2023 or earlier,” redefining what a wallet should do—keep funds safe—into something closer to a predatory financial institution.

October produced the year’s most spectacular numerical error when Paxos, the stablecoin issuer, accidentally minted 300 trillion PYUSD tokens. For 22 minutes, these tokens existed on the blockchain—a value equivalent to more than twice the global GDP. The error was caught and the tokens burned, but the incident exposed how casually institutions handle systems that control value comparable to entire world economies. If nothing else, it proved that even in cryptocurrency’s “park,” fundamental incompetence could move markets more than any innovation.

Candlestick Fabrication: When Charts Become Fiction

The market manipulation section of 2025’s greatest hits featured traders who simply drew candlesticks however they pleased. When quantitative trading algorithms collapsed and altcoin manipulators ran unchecked, the candlestick charts displayed on exchanges bore no resemblance to actual price movements—they were digital paintings rather than market data. It became impossible to distinguish between legitimate volatility and pure fabrication.

Projects Admitting the Inevitable

Eclipse, a project perpetually embroiled in scandals ranging from founder sexual assault allegations to repeated leadership upheavals, announced it had participated in a 36-month Harvard University sociological study. Upon completion, they posted simply: “We have no users.” The naked admission was almost refreshing in its honesty—a project finally discarding the pretense that it served any actual function. Shortly after, Eclipse announced ETHGAS as if the confession of total user abandonment hadn’t just occurred.

The Final Indignity: When Politics Met Memes

If the cryptocurrency industry possessed a “Wall of Shame,” the token MELANIA—launched by Trump’s wife in the middle of the night following her husband’s own crypto venture—would be permanently engraved at the top. The token was universally acknowledged as a “disgrace” to the entire sector, representing the final capitulation of crypto’s original ideals to naked celebrity and political opportunism.

Reflections from the Crypto Park

2025 will be remembered as the year when the cryptocurrency ecosystem fully embraced its nature as a park—neither a serious financial system nor a genuine innovation laboratory, but rather an amusement park where absurdity, fraud, incompetence, and occasional brilliance swirled together indistinguishably. From founders staging their own deaths to wallets automatically seizing funds, from hackers becoming victims of phishing schemes to tokens representing nothing but celebrity narcissism, the industry proved it had transcended any previous standard of ridiculousness. Yet remarkably, it survived. We—the participants in this experimental ground between innovation and chaos—made it through 2025 intact, ready to witness whatever greater absurdities 2026 might conjure from the depths of the crypto park.