Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the morning of November 14, Beijing time, it was reported that Sam Bankman-Fried (Sam Bankman-Fried) was the former boss of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In just eight days, he went from "king of cryptocurrency" to filing for bankruptcy, resigned as chief executive and faced a federal investigation into the company's finances.

In the past few years, there have been many long interviews with him on the Internet. He usually speaks via video chat in his office in the Bahamas. During some of the interviews, there was a disturbing click in the video.

The sound continued as people listened attentively to his story of how he became a billionaire in five years. It was obviously coming from his mouse. "click, click, click", the sound appears quickly and intermittently. At the same time, Kman-fried's eyes wobbled when the screen went to work.

It's not clear from the video interview what he was doing on his computer, but what he posted on Twitter provides a good clue. "I'm famous for playing League of Legends on a conference call," he wrote on Twitter in February 2021.

As the former boss of FTC, Bankman-Fried is an avid gamer. In a series of Twitter posts to his nearly 1 million followers, he explained why: playing "League of Legends" is a way for him to relax and make him forget about the two companies he is managing for a while. The daily trading volume of the two companies is as high as billions of dollars. "some people drink, some people gamble, but I play games," he said. "

Last week, the beleaguered FTX collapsed dramatically, and another anecdote about 30-year-old Bankman Fried playing games began to gain new attention online.

According to a blog post by Sequoia Capital, Bankman Fried was fighting fiercely in a "League of Legends" game while making a high-level video call with the investment team. However, this did not affect Sequoia Capital's interest in investment, and Sequoia Capital then invested 210 million US dollars in FTX. This week, however, Sequoia Capital deleted the blog post and announced that he would write down his investment in FTX as a loss.

Sequoia Capital is not the only investor to have suffered heavy losses since the collapse of Bankman-Fried's $32 billion empire. An estimated 1.2 million registered users on the FTX platform buy thousands of cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, through the exchange. From large traders to ordinary cryptocurrency enthusiasts, many people are watching to see if they can still get back the cryptocurrency they put in their FTX digital wallets.

It was a dizzying fall, and the rise of Bankman Fried is a story of risks, rewards and anecdotes.

Bankman Fried was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is a world-renowned research university where he majored in physics and mathematics. He once said that it was what he learned in the student dormitory that made him rich in cryptocurrency.

In an interview last month, he recalled that he had participated in the "efficient altruism" movement. Participants in this community are trying to explore what practical things people can do in life to have a positive impact on the world as much as possible. Influenced by this movement, he decided to go into banking, make as much money as possible, and then give it back to the public good.

He learned to trade stocks at Jane Street, a trading firm in New York. However, feeling bored with stock trading, he then decided to try bitcoin.

He noticed that there were differences in the price of Bitcoin in different cryptocurrency exchanges, creating room for arbitrage. Investors can buy bitcoins from lower-priced platforms and then sell them on higher-priced platforms. After making a meagre profit for a month, he partnered with some college friends to start a trading company called Alameda Research.

Mr Bankman-Fried says it is not easy and that he has spent months perfecting the technology for moving money in and out of banks and across borders. About three months later, he and his small team saw the payoff.

A year ago, he said on a podcast: "We are very tenacious. We just keep moving. If someone sets up a roadblock, we will find a way to solve it. If the existing system cannot handle it, we will develop a new system to tide over the difficulties."

By January 2018, his team will be earning $1 million a day.

A reporter once asked him how he felt. He replied that, according to his methodology, "it makes a lot of sense" from a rational point of view, "but deep down, it surprises me every day."

Bankman Fried officially became a billionaire in 2021 with another more high-profile company, FTX. FTX has grown into the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, with a daily trading volume of $10 billion to $15 billion.

At the beginning of 2022, FTX was valued at $32 billion and became a household name. The company even named a NBA stadium and won the support of celebrities such as NFL star Tom Tom Brady.

For a long time, Bankman-Fried seems to be happy to share his lifestyle with Twitter fans. He says he often sleeps in a sleeping bag next to his desk, accompanied by a picture of himself sleeping next to employees at the trading terminal. In another post posted in the early morning, he wrote: "I can't sleep. Go back to the office."

Bankman-Fried's dream of donating huge amounts of money to public welfare organizations is also coming true. In an interview last month, he claimed that he had donated "hundreds of millions of dollars".

His generosity is not limited to public welfare. In the past six months, the "king of cryptocurrency" has been nicknamed "the white knight of cryptocurrency". With the decline in the price of cryptocurrency in 2022, the cryptocurrency industry ushered in a cold winter. When other companies in the industry were in trouble, Bankman-Fried spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help them out.

Asked why he tried to rescue the failing cryptocurrency company, he said: "if we face real pain and thunderstorms, it will not be a good thing in the long run." it's not fair to customers. " In an interview at the time, he also claimed that he had $2 billion in reserves that could be used to help failing cryptocurrency companies.

Last week, however, he himself was in the same situation, having to try to raise money to save the company and its customers.

At first, an article on the cryptocurrency information website CoinDesk suggested that a large part of Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's trading company, was based on cryptocurrencies invented by a brother company in FTX, rather than independent assets. Subsequently, outsiders began to question the true financial stability of FTX. Subsequently, some industry insiders accused Alameda Research of using FTX customers' deposits as transaction loans.

When FTX's main competitor, Qian an, publicly sold all the cryptocurrencies linked to FTX a few days later, the end of FTX was doomed. Zhao Changpeng, chief executive of Yuan'an, told 7.5 million fans on Twitter that his company would sell all these cryptocurrencies "in view of the recent revelations."

This triggered a run on FTX, and panicked customers quickly withdrew billions of dollars from the platform.

FTX immediately suspended the fund withdrawal function. Bankman-Fried is trying to get a bailout, and Qian an has said publicly that it is considering buying FTX. However, Qian an later announced that the company's decision had been changed by FTX's "improper handling of customer funds and rumors of investigations by US regulators".

A day later, FTX declared bankruptcy. "I'm really sorry that we finally got to this point," Bankman-Fried said in a series of Twitter posts later. "hopefully we can find a way to recover. Hopefully this will bring some transparency, trust and governance mechanisms." He also said he was "shocked by the way things are going".

In the cryptocurrency industry, this was the case in the past, and it is now. The price of bitcoin has fallen to a two-year low. Many people are curious, if FTX and his leaders can fall off the altar, then who will be next?

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