I started covering the crypto industry at Fortune in August 2022, just a couple of months before FTX collapsed. I?ve never experienced a story like it. Sure, tech companies have imploded in spectacular fashion before?just look at Theranos?but FTX was something else. You had the young, idiosyncratic founder who flew too close to the sun, and the investors who turned a blind eye to clear red flags. But FTX was a financial services platform, and its failure meant the evaporation of billions of dollars?real money, not only to VCs, but normal people who trusted the company with their savings. It was the 2008 financial crisis but speedrun by 20-year-olds.

For the past six months, Allie Garfinkle and I have been reporting a story about a startup collapse that eerily echoes FTX, except for the amount of public attention it?s received. Like FTX, Synapse was a red-hot fintech company run by a wunderkind named Sankaet Pathak who wanted to upend financial infrastructure. And like Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX?s founder, Pathak convinced blue-chip investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, to fund his idea with tens of millions of dollars.

It ended in calamity.

Synapse was a financial middleman born in the ?banking as a service? wave, connecting fintech unicorns without banking charters such as Mercury and Dave with regional banks that were eager to take on new deposits. But as Synapse experienced astronomic growth during the last fintech boom, the startup suffered from poor internal controls and management, leading to the deterioration of relationships with its banking partners, and ultimately, its collapse.

When Synapse went bankrupt last April, it took down a number of fintech apps that relied on it to help store their customer deposits?apps like Yotta, which offered savings accounts to everyday users, enticing them with Powerball-style daily lottery drawings instead of boring interest dividends. Because of poor accounting, everyone involved in Synapse disputed the transaction history of the billions of dollars that Synapse was shuttling between fintechs like Yotta and regional banks, and $200 million of customer funds were frozen across the different apps.

Almost a year later, as much as $95 million is still missing. Customers are desperate, like Kayla Morris, who sold her house after members of her family had a series of health scares and decided to put $280,000 on Yotta, thinking that her account was FDIC-insured. She?s only gotten back $500.

There are a couple of takeaways from this story. One is the regulatory danger revealed by Synapse. Because it operated in a no man?s land in terms of supervision, no agency has stepped in?not the Federal Reserve, not the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and not the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Instead, each party is blaming the other, from Synapse to the banks to the fintech clients to the end users, with no end in sight. It?s a nightmare version of the Spiderman meme, where identical versions of the web-slinger point at each other. And it?s only likely to happen again as the Trump administration pushes its deregulatory agenda. (Fortune)

?The spectacular collapse of Synapse. ? Fortune ? Illustration by Fortune; Images from Getty- Rost-9D, Xuanyu Han, Jose A. Bernat Bacete

Update news