Recep Tayyip Erdoğan railed against the secular elite who had led the country to near economic collapse. A devout Muslim, he walked the streets of his home neighborhood, Kasımpaşa, a hardscrabble district where he grew up selling simit, or sesame bread, promising reform. In an upset election, he coasted into the role of mayor of Istanbul. By 2003, Erdoğan was elected prime minister, kicking off a decade of unprecedented growth that foreign observers called Turkey’s “Silent Revolution.” In a turn away from his predecessors, he governed through the lens of a businessman, inaugurating a massive building boom across the country and ultimately wrangling Turkey’s rampant inflation. Around the same time, two Turkish business moguls launched Turkcell, the nation’s first mobile communication system.

In his retelling, Özer arrived at the conclusion that the company itself was worth more than the funds in its wallet, so he saw only one way out: selling it. Özer showed the courtroom a news clip with the widely circulated headline that he had fled with $2 billion and defrauded 400,000 people. “As soon as this news – Source – started to appear, both investors were off the table … He started, he said, shopping it around in Istanbul, Italy, and the Balkans. He didn’t give their names. He eventually set up meetings with several potential buyers in Albania.

Soon I started receiving anonymous threats. A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. While others looked for the money, I decided to search for Özer. He Got a Pig Kidney Transplant. These Women Came to Antarctica for Science. He reminded me of the young founders I used to interview in San Francisco when I was covering tech in 2013-ambitious, naive, and at times loose with ethics. They came up short. Some vigilante programmers tried to trace the blockchain to see if they could find out if this was the work of one individual, a criminal network, or a vulnerable system.

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He could become rich. So at the age of 23, Özer founded Thodex with 40,000 lira-around $11,100 at the time-of his own money. Soon, Serap began working for Özer as a company accountant; Güven too seemed to be around a lot, but his ties were unofficial. Everybody might become rich. By this time, there were a few other notable exchanges, but Özer gave crypto a face and a ubiquitous presence. He put up ads on billboards and at bus stations; he installed Turkey’s first bitcoin ATM in a luxury mall in Istanbul’s posh Nişantaşı neighborhood, more as a stunt than anything. Using a playbook from Silicon Valley, Özer began spreading the gospel of crypto around Turkey.

BtcTurk, Turkey’s first crypto exchange (and reportedly the world’s fourth), was preparing to launch. Then, in May of that year, a group of activists gathered at Gezi Park in Istanbul to protest plans to redevelop it into a shopping mall with Ottoman-era architecture. They bridled not only at the loss of green space but also at the glorification of Turkey’s Islamist past in a society that called itself secular. Police brutally cracked down on the protesters, sparking a nationwide movement.