Sounds like magic the gathering card econ. Which is super fun! But personally, I definitely don't consider specing into Embercleave a meaningful societal mover
Nobody knows for sure, but the postmortem suggests that it might have been straight up incompetence. However, it's certainly possible to consider that the "incompetence" was on purpose to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company.
"defi" is an interesting concept that gained a lot of traction over the summer. Over $10 billion in crypto assets has been deposited in various protocols such as Aave which is like a decentralised bank operating on ethereum.
One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".