Sam Bankfield-Fried: betting in the air

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This cryptocurrency darling was literally born on the Stanford campus, seemingly the cradle of unbridled ambition. In 2017, at the age of 25, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm, and shortly after, after attending a cryptocurrency conference, he created FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. The company raised $400 million in its first round of funding and thus began a meteoric rise.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index , Bankfield-Fried once amassed a fortune of $25 billion. Until 2022, FTX experienced a “solvency crisis,” a kind of unprecedented crypto-corralito. The company went bankrupt overnight.


AI-generated image mimicking Sam Bankman-Fried's Forbes magazine cover
After the initial shock, reports began to taiyuan mobile number database emerge from various sources claiming that this was destined to happen. According to company employees, decisions were made via chat and no records were kept. Board meetings were never held, there was no accurate accounting, and there were no records of who worked at FTX.

In a Twitter thread, Bankfield-Fried himself acknowledged making accounting mistakes. Even before the scandal, he had been surprisingly clear about what a fraud his company was, claiming that his assets were held in “mostly illiquid” assets. In an interview where it was suggested that he was in the Ponzi scheme, Bankfield-Fried responded that it was a “quite reasonable” conclusion.