Yotta is the 21^st century in miniature

Yotta was everywhere on YouTube a few years ago, sponsoring an army of personal finance and general-interest creators. The idea was brilliant: use the psychology of gambling to trick people into saving money. For every $25 saved, players (sorry, depositors) would get one ticket to win the weekly jackpot of up to $10 million. Meanwhile, funds sat securely in an FDIC-insured savings account. All the fun of gambling except you can never lose.

Somewhere along the way, Yotta or one of its partners (Synapse and Evolve Bank & Trust) did an oopsy and lost track of somewhere between $60 and $90 million USD. In 2024, depositors found out about this and also that their funds weren’t FDIC insured after all. Many ordinary users lost basically everything.

Unlike the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank the year before, when the government stepped in to make wealthy depositors and venture-backed companies whole, nobody was coming to save them. These were ordinary people, after all.

Yotta still exists. It’s just a straight-up casino now.

The whole world has become a casino, as one of our era’s great cultural observers put it.