David Z. Morris Joins Zero Knowledge Group
Zero Knowledge Group (ZKG) is excited to announce the addition of veteran investigator, analyst, and author of “Stealing the Future,” David Z. Morris, PhD, to its team. David joins to help advance our mission of being unusually grumpy about risk spreading good financial sense across emergent industries.
As a longtime reporter for Fortune Magazine, a founding staffer of the fondly remembered Breaker Magazine, and Chief Insights Columnist for CoinDesk, David has shown powerful foresight for more than a decade about the long arc of technological progress. He was one of the first journalists to write seriously about the systemic implications of cryptocurrency in early 2014. The same year, he became the first journalist ever to interview the Ethereum founding team, and later covered Bitcoin’s “Block Size War” for The Atlantic. He has been reporting on Elon Musk and SpaceX regularly since 2015.
In addition to technological and market foresight, David brings a skeptic’s eye and a keen understanding of human frailty. He has again and again helped stop or warn against the exploitation of technological progress by bad actors and bad ideas. This has included investigating convicted fraudster Trevor Milton; predicting the violent unwind of Do Kwon’s TerraUSD stablecoin; and warning against Michael Saylor’s Strategy, Alex Mashinsky’s Celsius, and numerous other financial fantasies. His documentary series “Crypto Crooks” highlighted stunning revelations about the early crypto fraud BitConnect and India’s ruling BJP.
He was also the earliest prominent journalist to identify Sam Bankman-Fried’s activities at FTX as criminal. His coverage of Bankman-Fried’s crimes and trial became a book, “Stealing the Future”(Repeater Books, 2025), which examined not just Bankman-Fried’s fraud, but the ideology, ethics, and culture that helped create such an unrepentant monster.
David’s unique insight into the present was forged by his early career as a scholar and teacher of the history of technology. He is the author of multiple award-winning peer-reviewed research papers on the societal impacts of technological change, and is a former visiting scholar at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai) and the University of South Florida. He holds a PhD focused on communication technology from the University of Iowa.
David joins Zero Knowledge Group to enhance our strengths in due diligence, strategic communication, and risk modeling. ZKG, founded and led by career trader and risk expert Austin Campbell, advises institutions on strategic development, risk management, and regulatory compliance in stablecoins and other emergent technologies.
David’s skeptical optimism aligns with the fundamental perspective of Zero Knowledge Group: that the massive transformational opportunity of next-generation finance is accompanied by riches-or-bankruptcy-level risks, all the more dangerous because their novelty makes them harder to understand.
David will also support a major new project coming in the fall of 2026.
Stay tuned.
