$HONGBAO arrived as a red envelope tossed onto the chain, a name meant for luck, for coins passed hand to hand at a new year's table. No first holder is named in the archivist's memory, only the crowd that came after: Caspar, Brisa, Thane, Anselm, Brisa the second, each pouring in fractions of ether and drawing out fractions again, sixty six buyers in a single day, forty eight ether churned through it like water through a cracked jar.
It lived eight hours, which is not nothing, and it climbed to a peak nine market caps had once dreamed of. Then came the cliff: one five minute reading and forty five percent of its worth gone, the bulk of a seventy percent fall packed into that single breath. By eighteen nine on the thirteenth its liquidity had thinned to thirteen hundredths of an ether, its price a shadow at just over a hundred thousandth of a cent, and the archivist wrote it down as dead.
Six envelopes bearing this name were opened before it and none were emptied; this seventh alone spilled to nothing. Luck, it turns out, is not hereditary.