Bankman-Fried: Asian Bitcoin spreads exceeded 20% in late 2017
Sam Bankman-Fried · FTX with Sam Bankman-Fried & Mario Gabriele (Extended Cut) · Acquired · Dec 15, 2021 · at 10:00
Sam Bankman-Fried discusses the market inefficiencies he noticed on CoinMarketCap in late 2017 prior to founding quantitative trading firm Alameda Research.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Coinbase to Bitstamp was usually like one or two percent. And that's not even looking at like Bitfinex or anything based on Tether or Japan or Korea or anything like that, right, which would sometimes get in the twenties of percents.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sam Bankman-Fried
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”