Sam Bankman-Fried
Bio
- From The Defiant (10-11-2020):
SB: "I was an ETF trader at Jane Street Capital before I got into crypto, on Wall Street and left in 2017, and sort of checked out a number of things, including briefly looking at CoinMarketCap and seeing some pretty big arbitrages and ended up basically diving into crypto trading. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do when I left, but I checked out a number of things. When I checked out crypto, it was sort of with an eye towards, like are there good trades to do here? Are there good arbitrages, quantitative modeling type things that would be worth doing? Basically seemed after looking into it a bit, like there are some pretty gigantic opportunities there, if any of this sort of data was real, and so you end up basically diving in.
Really quickly realized there were, in fact, gigantic opportunities here. But it was not easy to do them. There's a lot of operational work that went into getting set up to do one of these trades, because you had to get together your bank accounts with exchange accounts and withdrawal limits and blockchain infrastructure, and you had to understand the trading and the flow, and sort of a bunch of these things together in order to actually complete even just a single simple arbitrage. So I spent the next month building out a team and building up the infrastructure to do that.
CR: That was kind of how Alameda came about?
SB: Yeah, that was Alameda starting up late 2017."
"The entrepreneur informally known as SBF said he felt relieved and excited. But it’s daunting, he said. The plaudits add an extra layer—not much, but enough to notice—of responsibility to his job, where he builds systems people have invested “a lot of their time and life and money into.""
Occupations
- FTX and Almeda Research; CEO
- SushiSwap; holder of the Admin Keys, due to Chef Nomi giving them to him (7-9-2020) after criticism for selling his founder holdings. Also the largest (7-9-2020) SUSHI farmer and holder. He denies knowing Chef Nomi, or that getting the keys was planned (9-9-2020):
"The project also completed the selection process for the new multisig signers that would hold the keys to the treasury and the contracts. Bankman-Fried was voted in, but he said that he will take a less active role after the initial transition is over: “I may share thoughts and suggestions on it, but I'm not going to be running it, that’s up to the SUSHI holders. Ultimately, it's not up to me long-term what happens.”"
Investments
- From CoinDesk (5-11-2020):
"Made the second-largest donation to former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to details revealed in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 28. The Hong Kong-based CEO gifted Biden's campaign a total of $5.2 million, behind only former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $56 million donation. Bankman-Fried is a member of the wealthiest Democratic super PAC, Future Forward, which includes Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt."
"Bankman-Fried is the richest of the crypto billionaires, with a fortune of $8.7 billion."
