Cryptocurrency Scams Are Now a Top SEC Enforcement Priority by Jeff John Roberts

Alphabet's GV, Samsung, Venrock Buy Into CryptoKitties by Lucinda Shen

Is There Any Doubt This Man Created Bitcoin? by Jeff John Roberts

Coinbase Raises $300 Million, Cites "Thousands" of Crypto Assets by Jeff John Roberts

To the Moon... Grayscale sees record crypto investment. A 67,000 acre crypto utopia grows outside of Reno. Online blockchain voting will restore trust in democracy. Coinbase brings in $1.3 billion in revenue, adds a new token. Hardware wallet maker Ledger adds stable coins.

...Rekt. Bitcoin "will burn the planet down." Those ICO figures look fishy. Coinbase's head of trading out after 6 months. SEC to issue plain English guidance on ICOs. Gwyneth Paltrow has crypto investing advice. Bitter breakup of Shrem and the Winkelvii leads to lawsuit. Tether still sketchy. Blogger bros in a crypto cat fight.

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Our latest guest on Balancing the Ledger was Robert Leshner, CEO of Compound, a site that's building an interest rate market for cryptocurrencies. Be sure to listen to his smart takes on stable coins (they're a great deal--for the issuers) and what the end of low Fed rates mean for crypto.

Where there's chaos, there's opportunity. The same aspects of crypto markets that vex investors--extreme volatility, sketchy players, puzzling valuation metrics--are proving a boon for the Big Four consultancies, who are making a mint by plying their accounting and consultancy services. An FT article titled "Auditors Grapple with Crypto and the Blockchain," drops a few eyebrow-raising numbers:

2: Number of accounting classifications for crypto (intangible assets vs inventory)

7: Number of "blockchain platforms" EY is building "for the cryptocurrency ecosystem"

150: Number of EY clients involved in crypto assets

400: Number of "blockchain experts" now employed by PWC

The Cult of St Vitalik. Hard core crypto folks have long talked about their favorite cryptocurrency with a religious-like zeal. But in the case of Ethereum, a wave of real world idolatry has been gathering around founder Vitalik Buterin. From a tweet at last week's Devcon summit:

Meanwhile, the legend of St. Vitalik grew a little more with Twitter hymns and the founder's sing-a-long of failed Ethereum ideas. Cool. Or weird. Or something.

Don't miss out: The blockchain-for-journalism startup Civil is having a rough few weeks. Its grand plans for an ICO washed out and no one, including die-hard crypto geeks, is sure what the hell it aspires to do. Now, along comes the New York Times with a schadenfreude-soaked takedown.

The NYT piece deflates whatever hype still surrounded Civil but, in our view, let's not rush to dance on their grave. It takes courage to experiment and, in five years, we may realize Civil--which is still pushing ahead--was simply ahead of its time.

Civil took its currency to market in September for a month. In the end, it fell short of the minimum number of tokens it had hoped to sell by more than $6 million. Of the approximately $1.4 million worth of tokens the company did sell, about 80 percent was purchased by ConsenSys-- the blockchain software company that underwrote Civil in the first place. It was as if an Olympic weight lifter said that, at a minimum, he'd be able to clean and jerk 400 pounds, and then did not manage to move the bar more than an inch off the ground.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of The Ledger. Find past editions here, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters here. Question, suggestion, or feedback? Drop us a line.