Easy: imagine one of the poor sobs decides to withdraw, hop a bit of creative accounting and your money is borrowed to pay for the withdrawal.

It s not each of the user individually seeing their balance go down, it s the company lying even more about its ability to liquidate all accounts.

Your number on their html page they graciously present to you will go unchanged. It s not a new phenomenon, every bank does it, except crypto.com does it to pay losses for a theft while banks would do it to lend to a baker buying a bakery on mortgage. If said baker screws up and cant repay, and many more others as well, clients cant all withdraw the pretty number.

Another interesting difference is that a bank pays you for lending to them with your savings account, at market rate (very low these days), while I dont think crypto ponzis do because you re suppose to just wait and moon.