“Everything has its price.”
The prophetic words are a sad epitaph on the life of a young digital-currency executive who may have killed herself amid the stress of a challenging, high-pressure industry.
After Autumn Radtke, the American CEO of First Meta, an exchange for virtual currencies such as Bitcoin, was found dead in her Singapore home last week, speculation immediately turned toward suicide.
As law-enforcement officials await toxicology reports, friends said they should have seen the signs of stress and realized that she was reaching out for help.
“Everything has its price,” Radtke, 28, said in commenting on an Inc. magazine essay she posted online titled ‘‘The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship.”
The article details the unrelenting financial and psychological toll of launching a successful startup.
“It was clear that she was a brilliant mind and a humble, giving person,” Radtke’s friend Krystal Choo, who founded the online travel firm ZipTrip, said in a Facebook post. “For the past couple of days I have been asking myself if I simply and massively failed in recognizing what could have been a call for help.”
Another Radtke friend, model Katie Stone, posted a heartfelt tribute to her friend on Facebook.
“Appreciative of what we take for granted,” Stone wrote. “You were just smarter that way than anybody else. You were a sister to me and I am at a loss,” Stone wrote.
Radtke ran a Singapore-based virtual-currency company at a time when the region was discouraging digital-currency exchanges.
Her death came amid a run of bad news for the Bitcoin virtual currency, largest of all the collapse of Japan’s Mt. Gox exchange, and the disappearance of $400 million from its account.
Regulators and law enforcement have become increasingly aggressive in investigating Bitcoin and related exchanges.
On the day that Radtke was discovered in her Singapore apartment, Vietnam’s communist government said trading in bitcoin and other electronic currencies is illegal, and warned its citizens not to use or invest in them.
Late last year, China banned its banks and payment systems from handling bitcoin. Thailand earlier put a blanket ban on its use.