In March 2020, a Silicon Valley engineer named Anatoly Yakovenko launched a new and better blockchain that offered a solution to maybe Bitcoin’s biggest weakness as a means of exchange: it was way too slow. Bitcoin could only validate seven transactions a second. The new Solana blockchain promised to process up to sixty-five thousand transactions a

Dropbox, in the years before its IPO, came to orient itself in a new direction—to focus on highest-value users in the highest-value networks interacting with the highest-value files.

In Hong Kong, Sam and his small team began to pitch the billionaire founders of existing exchanges on the idea of paying Alameda Research (Gary) to create a crypto exchange, different in important ways from any that existed. Alameda would supply the technology; the existing exchanges would supply the customers, and the trust.…

Some highlights have b

Sam had first met CZ not long after his move to Hong Kong at the end of 2018. Binance was looking for crypto companies to pay $150,000 apiece to sponsor its conference in early 2019 in Singapore, and Sam stepped in with the money. CZ had rewarded him by appearing onstage with him, and ever after, Sam was to say, “That’s what gave us legitimacy in c