Sam Bankman-Fried

Until November 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried was the richest man in crypto with his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading company.

The son of Stanford law professors, he studied physics at MIT but was attracted to “effective altruism,” the utilitarian-inflected perception of doing the best possible.

So he took a job trading ETFs at a quant company, donating a few of his profits to charity, then jumped into crypto trading in late 2017, when he spied a gainful arbitrage possibility.

Bankman-Fried released his exchange, FTX, in 2019. constructed “by traders, for traders,” it is one of the largest exchanges for buying and selling crypto derivatives.

FTX raised $900 million from Coinbase Ventures and SoftBank in July 2021 at an $18 billion valuation, assisting make Bankman-Fried one of the richest men below 30 in records.

Part of his wealth, which he says he’s going to finally donate to charity based on a philosophy known as “earning to give,” is tied up in the ownership of about half of FTX and a proportion of its FTT tokens.

On November 8th, 2022, FTX and its intermixed parent company Alameda Research started taking steps for their Insolvency and eventual Bankrupt. Sam Bankman-Fried’s wealth has diminished week after. Now some say he is no longer even a billionaire.

On December 13th, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas.