Sublime

The business hadn’t even really been Sam’s idea but Tara’s. Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors. Through the spring and summer of 2017, the two of them were on the phone constantly. At some point Sam revealed his romantic interest in her; at some o

of that explained what Sam was about to do at this moment—and what would later feel a lot harder to explain or even to believe. He set out to establish FTX as the world’s most regulated, most law-abiding, most rule-following crypto exchange. To acquire as many licenses to allow him to operate legally and openly in as many countries as he could. To

Davidson and Rees‐Mogg predict with remarkable prescience the form that the new digital monetary escape hatch will take: cryptographically secured forms of money independent of all physical restrictions that cannot be stopped or confiscated by government authorities.

Crypto’s original application required its original sin: tokenized architecture. The corrupting force of financialization ultimately overpowered the usefulness of the technology.