Post 9. Using advanced technology and expert knowledge.

Crypto’s 14th year in existence was one marred by scandal, bankruptcy, fraud and regulatory squabbling. It still may have been the industry’s best year ever.

The cast of “Crypto 2023” starred figures that are now practically synonymous with fraud: Sam Bankman-Fried, Changpeng Zhao, Alex Mashinsky, and, less prominently, Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein (aka ‘Bitcoin Bonnie and Clyde’).

Despite all the bad press, the young industry notched some notable wins.

Bitcoin, the crypto’s bellwether asset, is up 160% for the year. Two high-profile court cases came down in the industry’s favor. And a long-awaited approval for a mainstream investment product is expected in January, potentially flooding the scene with new investors.

Like the rest of the financial world, digital assets got a boost from an improving macroeconomic picture in cooling inflation, a growing economy, and a long-awaited end in sight for the Fed’s interest rate hikes.

One big component of that resiliency is how US authorities, particularly the Department of Justice, flexed their enforcement muscles on crypto, even in the absence of clear regulations.

No figure loomed quite as large over crypto in 2023 than Bankman-Fried, the entrepreneur once hailed as a visionary who was found guilty in November of orchestrating a yearslong, multibillion-dollar fraud through his FTX trading platform.

The trial of SBF, as he’s widely known, was the spectacle of the year for crypto’s biggest critics and its most strident fans.

For those inclined to cast crypto as an elaborate scam, the trial pulled back the curtain on the fly-by-night fraud underpinning FTX, which attracted millions of mainstream investors with its pitch as a beginner-friendly way to get into the emerging digital asset space. The rapid rise and fall of SBF is now Exhibit A for crypto detractors.

On the flip side, the crypto faithful who made SBF a into a billionaire pseudo-savior also cheered his conviction, casting the verdict as a an overdue purge of a bad apple.