NEW YORK - Not long after dropping out of college to pursue a career in cryptocurrencies, Ben Weintraub woke up to some bad news.

Mr Weintraub and two classmates from the University of Chicago had spent the past few months working on a software platform called Beanstalk, which offered a stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency with a fixed value of US$1. To their surprise, Beanstalk became an overnight sensation, attracting crypto speculators who viewed it as an exciting contribution to the experimental field of decentralised finance, or DeFi.