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Inside one of the therapy rooms at Castle Craig, an addiction treatment center in the Scottish Borders. 

Inside one of the therapy rooms at Castle Craig, an addiction treatment center in the Scottish Borders. 

Photographer: Emily Macinnes/Bloomberg
Wealth
Crypto

‘It Could Destroy Your Life’: Crypto Trading Goes to Rehab

From a $90,000-a-week Swiss clinic to inexpensive teletherapies, addiction specialists are offering treatments for compulsive crypto traders.

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The old cravings sometimes creep up on Stevie Rojas and work on his nerves and start to hijack his brain. But he says that he’s kicked the habit — that he’s quit cryptocurrencies cold turkey. A lot of people get into crypto. Rojas did, and more: He says he got hooked on it. Rojas is an entrepreneur in his early 30s, and he began experimenting with cryptocurrencies for all the usual reasons: boredom, curiosity, fear of missing out. He started with Bitcoin and discovered he liked the rush. He progressed to Ethereum and then to more exotic tokens — ones with bigger risks and bigger thrills.

He says he spent hours a day hunting for digital treasure on his smartphone. The ups made his pulse quicken. The downs left him strung-out. He says he gave up morning prayers and time with his baby daughter. He scrolled Reddit and chased the action instead. If he wasn’t trading crypto, he was thinking about trading crypto.