Last June, at a swanky, strobe-lit event in Washington, DC, Brendan Blumer, the 33-year-old CEO of a blockchain company called Block.one, unveiled a new product with Steve Jobs-like theatrics: a social network called Voice. A year earlier, Blumer’s company had raised $4 billion selling a crypto token called EOS. It was, by far, the largest-ever initial coin offering—more money than just about any US initial public offering that year.

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