Sam Bankman-Fried gives his candid assessment of the crypto derivatives market landscape prior to founding FTX.
Assertion Contradicted
Bankman-Fried: FTX's revenue is clean, clear, and completely transparent
“When you talk about, like, recurring revenue, like, there's sort of, like, doesn't exist a clearer example of that than, like, you know, I don't know, we have volume each day, and we charge a transaction fee on it, right? It's incredibly clean, right? People a…”
Assertion Contradicted
Bankman-Fried: The largest crypto exchange bled $1M daily from broken risk engines
“The biggest exchange at the time was bleeding each day about a million dollars of customer assets to a risk engine that didn't work.”
Disclosure
Bankman-Fried: FTX hired for composure under pressure rather than prior experience
“Experience is very much not what we hire for. Right. In fact, sometimes we're almost like, you know, I wouldn't quite say we're anti-selecting for it, but, like, we like flexibility, and we like, you know, much more than, like, I don't know, we can teach thing…”
Opinion
Bankman-Fried: Becoming the second largest crypto exchange would be a 'C' grade
“I think the plausible C is we just kind of don't really grow, you know, like you kind of look back at us like, you know, in a year and you're like, where is F, or in five years, you know, where is FTX now? And the answer is like, you know, they're like, you kn…”
Disclosure
Bankman-Fried: I could not describe a blockchain when I entered crypto
“I got one word further, but I couldn't have described a blockchain. I guess it was like, you know, they chained the blocks with the transactions in them, you know? I didn't really know who they was. I don't know if the blockchain does it. Like, I really didn't…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bankman-Fried: Alameda made about $1M a day on Japan Bitcoin arb
“We still made like a million dollars a day from it during that period.”