Ben McKenzie is known to a certain generation for his time spent as a TV actor, most famously playing Ryan Atwood, the bad boy with the heart of gold, in noughties California high school series The OC. 

But he also has a side hustle: for the past four years he has been one of the crypto industry’s most persistent critics. In December 2022, a month after Sam Bankman-Fried’s digital asset exchange FTX disintegrated, McKenzie gave evidence to the US Senate banking committee, telling senators that crypto was “the largest Ponzi scheme in history”. His book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, written with journalist Jacob Silverman, was published in…