Top 10 Craziest Crypto Stories of 2021 Brazen civil engineering projects, bizarre NFT releases and blatant scams: we recap this year’s craziest news stories from the crypto world.Between the skyrocketing popularity of meme coins and NFTs, a certain Central American country choosing to fully embrace Bitcoin and the ever-more elaborate scams, the crypto industry has seen some wild stories in 2021. Some were stupidly funny, others downright depressing and the select few — weirdly uplifting, and today we will take a look at the best ones.So without much ado, here are the ten crazies crypto stories of 2021, in no particular order:Melania Trump’s NFT Collection Results in Backlash While Crazy Frog Is Forced to Drop NFTs Against His WillWhile NFTs are reaching ever-higher levels of popularity, they are simultaneously becoming the target of more and more criticism for the often meaningless, exploitative or even downright criminal nature of several new NFT releases. Underscoring the current craziness of the market of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), two new announcements were made last week which could truly boggle the mind of someone who hasn’t been closely following the industry for the past several months.Melania Trump, the wife of former POTUS Donald Trump, has decided to publish her “Melania’s Vision” collection, resulting in some backlash. Each token is accompanied by a digital image of a watercolor painting of the former first lady’s “cobalt blue” eyes, as well as an audio “message of hope” by Mrs. Trump.An undisclosed portion of the proceeds from the NFT sale is slated to be donated to a charity cause for children aging out of the United States’ foster care system — with some commenters asking why didn’t Mrs. Trump choose to donate all of the earnings. Others have criticized the apparent lack of meaning behind specifically choosing the NFT format for this particular art sale.Another, even more bizarre story, involves Crazy Frog, a Swedish CGI musician character whose Axel F music video is currently the 25th most-watched video on YouTube at over three billion views.After briefly achieving international stardom, Crazy Frog had disappeared from the scene for more than a decade, only to reemerge a couple of weeks ago with a new single and an announcement of an NFT drop, the latter of which was almost universally criticized — with some commenters choosing to go as far as to send death threats to the unfortunate frog.As it turns out, the artists behind Crazy Frog actually had no personal desire to announce the sale of the controversial digital assets. Instead, they were apparently pressured into it by their producer, who is all but holding the cartoon frog hostage.Snoop Dogg Reveals He’s the Twitter-Famous NFT Influencer Cozomo de’ MediciIn other NFT-themed celebrity stories, it was revealed this September that the Cozomo de’ Medici account on Twitter is run by none other than the popular rapper and entrepreneur Snoop Dogg.Cozomo de Medici is a pseudonymous Twitter user who shares “tales & insights'' from the NFT industry. Besides tweeting memes and weighing in on discussions about digital assets and art, Cozomo also frequently showcases the NFTs that they own personally. Their combined portfolio of collectibles was estimated at about $17 million as of Sept. 25.The account is fairly popular as far as crypto influencers go — having amassed over 143 thousand followers as of Dec. 23 — but until recently, the person behind it was a complete enigma. Cozomo had teased a reveal on Sept. 17, tweeting:“I have been thinking a lot about this, and have realized my real life celebrity status may bring many welcomed eyeballs to NFT.”The actual reveal has never been made by Cozomo themselves, however, three days later Snoop Dogg had tweeted from his own official account:“I am @CozomoMedici”Although it might appear crazy to some, the revelation should not come as a total surprise to those who have been paying attention to Snoop Dogg’s recent social media activity. The famous rapper has been involved in the crypto space, and NFTs in particular, for the better part of 2021, having announced and subsequently released his first NFT collection back in March.Some users have theorized that Cozomo might not be the literal Snoop Dogg, but rather his digital asset manager, due to another reveal tweeted out by the crypto influencer themselves on Sept. 11. The posted image depicts two men standing on the shore of Lake Como in Italy, their faces concealed by digital masks.It is clear from the description that one of them is the American singer-songwriter Jason Derulo, while the other one is white and is thus highly unlikely to be Snoop Dogg:Famous Programmer, Entrepreneur and Crypto Proponent John McAfee Found Dead in His Prison CellMoving on to quite a bit more dark story, John McAfee was found dead in June in his prison cell in the penitentiary center near Barcelona, Spain, where he was incarcerated since October last year.McAfee initially obtained fame in 1987 as the creator of the eponymous antivirus program, which was the first commercial software of its kind. In the years that followed he had made, as well as lost millions of dollars by founding and/or investing in multiple business ventures in fields as varied as messaging and security software, ultra-light flight and herbal antibiotics.A staunch and outspoken critic of involuntary taxation, McAfee has openly admitted to not having filed a single tax return since 2010. As a result, the entrepreneur had been in self-imposed exile from the United States, hiding from tax evasion charges in Belize and, later, in international waters.It is no wonder that when Bitcoin (BTC) came about — built around, among other things, the libertarian ideals of financial privacy and independence — McAfee became one of its strongest supporters.In July 2017 the businessman had predicted that the price of Bitcoin would reach $500,000 in three years. McAfee was so confident in his prediction as to promise to “eat [his] own d*ck on national television” if it doesn’t come true.Neither the prediction nor the promised genital consumption came to be, as Bitcoin had only managed to reach the price of about $9,141 by July 17, 2020, while McAfee backed out of his bet, claiming that it was merely a “ruse” to attract new users to the cryptocurrency.The U.S. Department of Justice, assisted by Interpol, had finally caught up to him in October 2020, when he was arrested in Spain. After spending several months in a Spanish prison, McAfee was found dead in his cell following an apparent suicide on June 23, 2021, just hours after the court had authorized his extradition to the U.S.Several details of his death, including an earlier tweet in which he claimed that he would never commit suicide, have given rise to multiple conspiracy theories, none of which have been proven correct to date.Crypto Scam Revenue Grows 81% Year-Over-Year, Reaching Above $7.7 BillionA report published in December by the blockchain data firm Chainalysis has revealed the staggering scale reached by cryptocurrency scams in 2021. According to the company’s findings, the combined revenue from all crypto-based fraud has reached more than $7.7 billion this year, an increase of 81% over the 2020 numbers.It appears that this year’s impressive performance was mostly driven by a relatively new type of scam, the so-called “rug pull,” in which malicious actors spend some time pretending to work on a new project and generating hype around it, only to run away with investors’ funds after a sufficiently high sum has been secured. According to Chainalysis, if one subtracts the volume of rug pulls from the total scam revenue, the remainder will be on a similar level to that of last year.The decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, which was completely “plagued” by rug pulls according to the report, has suffered the most, contributing over $2.8 billion to this year’s total. AnubisDAO and Uranium Finance were the largest scams in this particular category. The largest overall rug pull, however, took place on a Turkish centralized crypto exchange (CEX) Thodex, which stole a mind-blowing $2 billion worth of digital assets from its customers in April this year.In a sign that crypto scammers are always improving their skills and becoming more efficient, the average active lifespan of a scam went down from over 2,000 days in 2013 to less than a hundred in 2021.A conflicting report by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic provides an even higher total estimate: according to the firm, fraud and theft in the DeFi space alone accounted for $10.5 billion in money lost this year. If Elliptic’s analysis is correct, it would make 2021 the current all-time high year for the crypto scam “industry.”Indian Prime Minister’s Twitter Account Gets Hacked, Used to Promote Bitcoin Giveaway ScamNow that we’ve dealt with the general statistics, let’s zoom in on the specifics of a couple of the more crazy scams of 2021. The first of these took place less than two weeks ago: the Twitter account of Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, was hacked in order to promote a Bitcoin giveaway scam.Modi’s Twitter account was “very briefly compromised,” as his team later explained, on Saturday, Dec. 11, and used to post a fake announcement that India has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. The tweet also falsely claimed that the Indian government had purchased 500 BTC to give away to its citizens and included a link to an article on Blogspot.com promoting the fake giveaway.The prime minister’s team had quickly reacted to regain control of the account, delete the offending tweet and inform the followers of the incident.Giveaway scams targeting high-level Twitter accounts usually work by asking the followers to send Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to the scammer’s address with a promise to send back double the amount — which, of course never happens — and are not