The face of cryptoĭespite his ballooning wealth, Bankman-Fried maintained the appearance and lifestyle of a teenage gamer. Soon, FTX was among the biggest players in the industry. He even raised money from billionaire hedge fund legends Paul Tudor Jones and Israel Englander. FTX took off and brought in the big-name celebrity endorsers and partners, like professional athletes Tom Brady and Steph Curry.īankman-Fried soon found himself feted by some of the biggest institutions in finance, attracting investment from the biggest names on Wall Street and beyond like Softbank The timing was fortuitous: as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe the following year, interest in cryptocurrencies among people exploded. In 2019, Bankman-Fried launched the crypto exchange FTX. and Japan, where prices were often slightly higher. Over the next year, he began building his fortune through arbitrage trading of Bitcoinīetween exchanges in the U.S. In 2017, he launched Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm focused on digital currencies. He studied physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Īfter a stint as an ETF trader for Jane Street Capital, a highly respected Wall Street firm that is known for attracting genius quantitative traders, Bankman-Fried became interested in the concept of effective altruism, a philosophy that focuses on using reason and evidence to find solutions that benefit the most people possible. The son of law professors at Stanford University, Bankman-Fried was a wunderkind from an early age. His schlubby, boyish appearance - ill-fitting t-shirts, gym shorts and a mop of curly hair - made him look more like a college student ripping bong hits in the basement of a frat house than a finance guru, but fit nicely with the anti-establishment ethos that appealed to crypto enthusiasts. It took less than five years for Bankman-Fried to build a personal fortune that was estimated at its highest point to be more than $26 billion, making him among the richest people in the world. “I fucked up, and should have done better,” he wrote. On Thursday, the 30-year-old Bankman-Fried took to Twitter to level with his clients. by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice, according to reports. Fast forward to Sunday and Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire came crashing down, the victim of an old-fashioned bank run that quickly exposed the weaknesses of the new finance system he had championed.Īlmost overnight, Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, had gone from being valued at $32 billion to worthless, leaving scores of investors scrambling to get their deposits back and triggering probes in the U.S.
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