Want to dodge the next Luna, FTX, Mt.Gox?
Start by seeing how the previous 53 went down.
Walk this archive once and you will avoid the five most common ways people lose everything in crypto — picking the wrong exchange, trusting the wrong stablecoin, crossing the wrong bridge, signing the wrong contract, chasing a "guaranteed yield" promise. Each one comes with a real case: which exchange died how, how much was lost, what people were thinking at the time, what the survivors did afterwards.
This is not a news site. It is the full post-mortem of every crypto project that has already died in the last 16 years — read it and the next sinking ship is visible earlier.
Quick reference · five exchanges scored
| Exchange | PoR | Licences | User insurance | Affiliate isolation | CEO talks plainly | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 5 / 5 |
| Coinbase | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 5 / 5 |
| Kraken | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ½ | 4.5 / 5 |
| Bybit | ✓ | ½ | ½ | ½ | ½ | 3 / 5 |
| OKX | ✓ | ½ | — | ½ | ½ | 2.5 / 5 |
Full methodology and the verification recipe for each filter are in Archaeology · Lesson Two. This table is dated May 2026 and should be re-run every six months.
* This is Keeper Shen's personal score across five public dimensions (PoR / licences / SAFU / affiliate isolation / CEO public statements). It is not a third-party authority ranking. Methodology in Lesson Two.
Before the doors open, a few words.
I bought my first bitcoin in 2017. I parked it on a small Italian exchange called BitGrail — the UI looked like a 2003 forum, but there were people. The next year it went under, and my few NANO went with it. Not a large sum, but the feeling — "it is right there in my account and I will never touch it again" — stayed.
After that I started writing things down. How Mt.Gox actually sank. How Cryptopia wiped clean overnight. Whether the QuadrigaCX founder really died or only seemed to. Every tweet Do Kwon posted during Luna's 36 hours. I wrote it for myself first, then for a few friends, and finally — since I was writing anyway — I decided to put up a building for it.
This archive does exactly one thing: take projects that have already sunk to the bottom, lift each one back up, and reconstruct, ship by ship, how it sank. Not for spectacle. So that the next person walking down the gangway has seen a few sunken hulls before they decide to climb aboard one.
I write every article myself. I do not take commissioned pieces. I do no PR for any platform. That rule is posted at the front gate and printed in the colophon of every piece.
—— Keeper Shen, May 15, 2026
Archive Index · Volume 1
Shipwreck Annals · Addendum · ⭐ CornerstoneThe Complete Crypto Black Swans History 2010-2026: 53 disasters, $110B+ in losses, 12 hard-won lessons
Two weeks of editing went into this cornerstone piece. From the 2011 Mt.Gox early breach to the 2025 Bybit $1.4B hijack — 15 years, 40+ ships at the bottom, accumulated losses north of $110 billion on paper. Six chapters of context plus 12 lessons you can use immediately. If you read only one piece in Crypto Archives, read this one.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IMt.Gox · 850,000 BTC, eleven years of slow sinking
From a Magic-the-Gathering card-trading site to the world's largest bitcoin exchange to a bankruptcy filing that is still distributing assets twelve years later. The strange thing about this shipwreck is that it is still paying out. This piece reconstructs the timeline year by year, from the 2010 launch to the latest 2026 distribution round, and explains why the case still matters today.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IILuna's 36 Hours · The death spiral of an algorithmic stablecoin
From the early hours of May 9, 2022 to the night of May 12, UST fell from $1 to nine cents and LUNA fell from $65 to a price you need a magnifying glass to read. Anchor's 20% yield, the 4Pool plan, LFG's last-stand 80,000 BTC — every gear in that death spiral is still here, and this piece freezes them one frame at a time.
Shipwreck Annals · Vol. IIIThe Night of the FTX Empire · From $32B valuation to insolvency in nine days
November 2, 2022 — CoinDesk publishes the leaked Alameda balance sheet. November 11 — FTX files for bankruptcy. Nine days. Inside those nine days SBF made 23 public statements, six conference calls, two takeover attempts. This piece reconstructs the collapse hour by hour, and decodes the SBF–CZ Twitter exchange that is still being quoted today.
Shipwreck Annals · Outer VolumePlusToken · The Largest Crypto Ponzi, Traced On-Chain
A Ponzi scheme packed into a mobile wallet, sold as a high-yield "AI arbitrage" account, then inflated by multi-level referral commissions until it reportedly swept up millions of members and roughly 200,000 BTC. In the summer of 2019 the withdrawals stopped overnight. This volume reconstructs how it rose, how it broke, and how Chainalysis and others traced the proceeds on-chain — the case that proves money can be hidden on-chain but not from the chain.
Archaeology · Lesson TwoFive selection criteria distilled from eight exchange collapses
Mt.Gox, Cryptopia, QuadrigaCX, FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BitGrail, Bitfinex 2016 — line up the wreckage and the same early warning signs keep appearing. This piece distills those signals into five pre-mortem criteria — the same five I now use every six months on whichever exchange I am currently keeping money on.
Archaeology · Lesson ThreeHow to tell whether a crypto exchange is trustworthy: 8 red flags + a hands-on checklist
"Is this exchange safe?" is the question I get most — and "safe" is a feeling, while evidence is what holds. This piece breaks the judgement into two parts: 8 red flags you can spot without any technical knowledge, and a 5-step checklist you can run yourself (app store, domain age, proof of reserves, regulatory registers, on-chain reserves). After reading, you can check any exchange on your own.
Archaeology · CustodyExchange or wallet — where are your coins actually safer?
"Don't leave coins on an exchange" and "self-custody is riskier than you think" are both true, which is exactly where newcomers freeze. No slogans here: this piece lays the two real risk profiles side by side — exchange collapse vs lost keys, signature phishing vs SAFU backstop — explains who should pick which, how to layer assets by amount, and ends with a table you can copy.
Safety tools · check it yourself
Finished the cases and want to act now? These two tools turn the judgement methods from the lessons and the verification desk into tick-box checklists — no technical background needed; walk through them and score the exchange and the funds in your own hands.
Tool · Exchange self-checkExchange Safety Self-Check: score the 8 red flags one by one
An interactive scoring sheet built from Lesson Three's 8 red flags and 5-step checklist — proof of reserves, multi-jurisdiction licences, user insurance, app-store rating, domain age all tick off into a single risk score, and it points out which items most need a closer look. Whether an exchange is safe to fund, you can now check yourself.
Tool · Fund self-defenceFund Safety Checklist: from position splitting to key backup, tick off your blind spots
Every fund-safety action distilled from the wrecks in this archive, gathered into one tick-box checklist — asset layering, hot/cold wallet separation, private key and seed backup, periodic review of signing approvals, an emergency contact. Tick each line and the gaps surface immediately; then you just fill them.
Referral · Binance
Affiliate Disclosure · BN16188Binance Referral Code BN16188 · what you actually get, in plain English
This archive is a Binance Affiliate Partner. Registering with code BN16188 unlocks up to 20% spot trading fee reduction. The full referral page explains exactly what the discount covers, where it sits in Binance's published rebate table, and why I picked Binance over the four other exchanges I scored in Lesson Two. Decide for yourself after reading.
This archive's job is to help you avoid a few wrecks, not to talk you out of crypto. Crypto itself is not the problem; the problem is putting it in the wrong place. If you want to start from a platform whose risk signals can still be counted on one hand, the one I have been using is Binance — for boring reasons: it is one of the few large exchanges that publishes monthly Proof of Reserves, is regulated under France AMF / Italy OAM / Dubai VARA and other jurisdictions, and operates the SAFU user-protection fund. None of this means it has no risk. It means today's risk signals are fewer than those of the eight ships scored in Lesson Two. If you are unsure whether to keep coins on it at all, read exchange or wallet, where is it safer first.
The whole archive at a glance
One page straight to every piece — sorted by category, so you can jump to the ship, the lesson, or the check you care about most.
Shipwreck Annals Black Swans, full history · Mt.Gox · Luna's collapse · The Night of FTX · PlusToken Ponzi
Archaeology Lessons Lesson Two · five criteria · Lesson Three · judging an exchange · Exchange or wallet, where is it safer
Safety tools Exchange safety self-check · Fund safety checklist
Referral Binance referral BN16188 explained
Visitor FAQ
The articles are not paid and not commissioned. The button in the "if you decide to start" section carries my Binance referral code, and I use that platform myself. That relationship is disclosed at the end of every article. Beyond it, there is no sponsorship, no display advertising, no project placement.
Because for dead projects the material is all on the table — bankruptcy filings, court transcripts, on-chain records, post-event interviews. The FTX and PlusToken write-ups lean entirely on that kind of public record. For rising projects the record is incomplete, so anything written is partly guesswork. I'd rather write slower and write closer to the truth.
Every article ends with a "primary sources" list — court filings, bankruptcy trustee reports, on-chain transaction hashes, post-event statements from the parties involved. If you spot a mistake, email me ([email protected]); I'll publish a correction and credit you.
No. "Keeper Shen" is a pen name. I'm still working a day job in crypto, and I would rather these post-mortems not blow back on my employer. But every article I write, sign, and stand behind personally. A longer version of what I do and what I will not write about is on the About page.
Volume 2 is planned for Q3 2026. Three ships in queue: Celsius, Voyager, Cryptopia. Plus Archaeology Lesson Three on hardware wallets. In the meantime, the Black Swans cornerstone already covers all of them in brief. I'll announce the new volume on RSS and the front page when it ships.