It took Michael three years to become a millionaire and only three days in May to lose it all.

The thirty-six-year-old Prague-based IT professional had a simple system in place: deposit a portion of his paycheck into various cryptocurrencies and then sit back and watch the “number go up,” as they say in crypto slang. By early 2022, the $200,000 of real-life currency he’d converted to crypto had ballooned into $1 million.

“It seemed like a license to print money, literally,” says Michael, which is a pseudonym he requested.