Sam Bankman-Fried explains to Acquired why FTX raised venture capital easily compared to Alameda Research, pointing to FTX's clean, legible transaction-fee business model.
Opinion
Bankman-Fried: The two dominant crypto futures exchanges in 2018 were 'shitshows'
“There are only two real players in it, and they're shitshows. But they're still printing money, despite being shitshows.”
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.”