LOOKING FOR TONI LANE

She was crypto's It Girl, the young woman onstage at the conferences hyping blockchain as a way to radically reshape an unjust world. The young woman at the industry parties schmoozing with wealthy venture capitalists to get them on board. The young woman at the spiritual retreats seeking endless ways to self-improve. People loved her. And then she disappeared. What happened to Toni Lane Casserly-and what does her tragic death reveal?

- JESSICA KLEIN

THE LIVESTREAM HAS BEGUN.

She sits in an off-white easy chair in a nondescript room. She's relaxed yet radiant, her dark eyes dancing with anticipation. Across from her, an interviewer, a seemingly affable dude in a graphic tee, grins and points. That's her cue. She flutters her fingers outward from her face. Her painted lips part. "I'll beeeee seeing youuuuu / In all the old familiar places...." Toni Lane Casserly, channeling Billie Holiday, sings the classic song a cappella with just about perfect pitch. The dude swoons.

You wouldn't know it from the cold open, but this is a conversation about the blockchain technology that fuels cryptocurrencies. About the new world order Toni is working to construct, an inverted model of society as we know it.

The date is December 7, 2018. Toni is 27 and industry-famous, at the top of her game. As one of the few women in crypto, she stands out, not just because of her gender but because of her style-free-flowing, jazzy-and her values. While many of her peers hole up in hacker houses and race to pump out "magic internet money," as one bluntly puts it, Toni worries over issues like state violence, mass dispossession, disaster-fueled climate migration, and the gatekeeping of wealth by the ruling class. Let us not turn away, she counsels. Together we can fix this. We must.

Part of the solution, she believes, are blockchains-permanent digital ledgers maintained by decentralized networks of computers. These data banks store documents and financial transactions; they keep score. And ultimately, Toni preaches, they will introduce a new kind of accountability, put control in the hands of the people, and shift the paradigms of global power.