161 Greenwich High Road
Greenwich
London SE10 8JA
Hundreds of Countries.
Billions of Dollars.
One Lie.
In 2014 a brilliant Oxford graduate called Dr Ruja Ignatova promised to revolutionise money and make people rich in the process. The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And the self-styled cryptoqueen vowed that she had invented the Bitcoin Killer. She launched OneCoin, an exciting new cryptocurrency that she promised would not only earn its investors untold fortunes, it would change the world. OneCoin swept the globe – becoming one of the fastest companies to make $1 billion in revenue.
By 2017, billions of dollars had been invested in OneCoin in hundreds of countries, from the USA to Pakistan, Hong Kong to Yemen, and the UK to Uganda. But by the end of the year Ruja Ignatova had disappeared, along with the money, and it slowly became clear that her revolutionary cryptocurrency was not all it seemed.
Jamie Bartlett will tell the unbelievable story of the rise, disappearance and fall of Dr Ruja Ignatova. It is a modern tale of intrigue, techno-hype and herd madness that reveals how OneCoin became the biggest scam of the 21st Century.
Jamie Bartlett is the bestselling author of The Dark Net, Radicals, and The People Vs Tech, which was longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and won the 2019 Transmission Prize. He founded the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos and regularly writes on technology and society for the Spectator and the Telegraph.
Copies of his latest book, The Missing Cryptoqueen, will be available for purchase at this event.