Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

And yet it still obviously had lots of room to grow. Its biggest rival, Binance, had five times the trading volume of FTX, which meant that it likely had roughly five times FTX’s revenues and five times FTX’s market value. The experts who tried to determine the present value of rich people had trouble putting a number on CZ’s. No one was sure how m

Crypto exchanges and token creators who wanted to sell to Americans insisted that these tokens weren’t securities but more like, say, Starbucks Rewards points. As FTX was incorporated in Antigua, operated in Hong Kong, and in principle did not allow American investors to trade on its crypto exchange, and in principle did not sell its tokens to Amer

Sam explained how Jane Street made money, and added that the crypto markets were dominated by retail traders who didn’t pay much attention to price discrepancies from one crypto exchange to the next. To which Nishad responded: Why is it not the case that Jane Street or some other high-frequency trading firm will come along and take over the crypto

The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

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In the end, for Sam to leave he had to want to leave, and Sam did not really want to leave. And so, on April 9, 2018, his entire management team, along with half of his employees, walked out the door, with somewhere between one and two million dollars in severance. At that moment, the outside investors were in the same uneasy position as Bob’s frie

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Sam later couldn’t remember exactly why he’d agreed to fly to Asia in the first place. It wasn’t to see sights in which he had zero interest. Flying frightened him so badly that, before takeoff, he had to medicate himself and listen to soothing music. “Viscerally I’ve never believed that a hunk of metal would fly,” he said. The stated purpose of hi

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