Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

In their willingness to court the wrath of US financial regulators, the crypto exchanges fell into one of at least four categories. A small group of tiny US exchanges listed only bitcoin and ether, the two oldest coins, blessed by the SEC as commodities and openly regulated by the CFTC. (A bit oddly, the older the coin, the more people thought of i

The money nearly always came not from FTX but from Alameda Research, which Ramnik and everyone else thought of as Sam’s private fund.

Still, he was tempted. There were moments when the price of bitcoin in South Korea was 50 percent higher than the price of bitcoin in the United States. At that point you didn’t even need currencies. All you needed was to buy a huge amount of something with the won that you could then sell outside of South Korea for a huge number of dollars. Briefl

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

When ETFs changed hands, Jane Street was often present to take an ant-bite-sized piece of the transaction. The role of the Jane Street trader—one of the biggest sources of profits—was to keep the prices of all of these ETFs in line with the assets inside of them. The price of any pool of assets should always, in theory, be equal to the sum of the a

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

And yet FTX was just a piece of a much larger puzzle of Sam’s design. He owned 90 percent of Alameda Research. And the nature of Alameda Research was changing. It was still a quant trading firm, with its good months and bad months, but its traders were playing, in new ways, with bigger and bigger sums of money. Crypto world had created what were, i

Crystal Springs made no difference. “I hated it there too,” said Sam. “The whole way through. I didn’t like classes. I didn’t like my schoolmates. I was bored.” The student body was a who’s who of Silicon Valley children. (Steve Jobs’s son, Reed, was in Sam’s class.) By most standards it was a nerdy school. A jock was a person who ran track. To Sam