/data/photo/2022/11/19/6378a36c4d939.jpg?fit=%2C&ssl=1 "The End of Cryptocurrency King Sam Bankman-Fried, Founder of FTX Who Lost IDR 500 Trillion in Few Days")
WASHINGTON DC, KOMPAS.com – Life Sam Bankman-Fried “Crypto King,” founding father FTP extension (bag cryptocurrency), drastically changed in less than eight days.
He stepped down as CEO of FTX on Friday (11/14/2022) and soon his company filed for bankruptcy.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s resignation from the CEO position comes after he faces a federal investigation into his handling of the company’s finances.
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In recent years, the internet has been flooded with lengthy interviews of him, video chatting from his desk in the Bahamas.
Eerie clicking sounds were heard in some of the interviews.
As the audience listened intently to his incredible story of how he became a multi-billionaire in five years, the American businessman’s mouse clicked distinctly.
“Click, click, click,” the sound was fast and continuous.
As Bankman-Fried’s eyes scanned the screen in front of him, those watching his video had no idea exactly what he was doing on his computer.
However, his tweet provides a pretty clear clue.
“I’m famous for playing League of Legends on the phone,” he tweeted in February 2021.
Game lover
The former head of FTX (the now troubled cryptocurrency exchange) is a computer game enthusiast.
In a series of tweets to his nearly one million followers, he explained why.
Playing fantasy fighting games as a team was his way of distracting himself from the two companies, trading billions of dollars a day, that he was supposed to be managing.
“Some people drink too much; some gamble. I play league,” he said.
Since the 30-year-old’s cryptocurrency empire collapsed dramatically last week, another anecdote about his game has resurfaced online.
In a blog post from venture capital giant Sequoia Capital, it was revealed that Bankman-Fried is playing League of Legends in high spirits, during a very important video call with their investment team.
Sam Bankman-Fried also loves playing the Storybook Brawl video game, so much so that he bought the manufacturer in March 2022.
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However, that didn’t seem to put them off at all.
The group continued to invest $210 million (about Rs. 3.26 trillion) in Bankman-Fried’s FTX firm.
This week, Sequoia Capital deleted their blog post and are now reporting their investment in FTX as a loss.
The company isn’t the only investor to lose a lot of money since Bankman-Fried’s $32 billion crypto empire collapsed.
FTX has around 1.2 million registered users who use the exchange to purchase cryptocurrency tokens such as Bitcoin and thousands of other tokens.
Now, many, from wholesalers to casual cryptocurrency enthusiasts, are wondering if they will get their money back trapped in the FTX digital wallet.
It was a dizzying time of his downfall. But Bankman-Fried’s success also has its own dramatic story of risk, reward and money pouf.
Read also: US authorities require Binance’s internal registries to investigate cryptocurrency laundering
The beginning of a young billionaire
Bankman-Fried attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a prestigious US research university, where he studied physics and mathematics.
However, the brilliant young scholar claimed that it was the lessons he took in the student dormitories that made him wealthy.
In an interview Radio BBC last month, he recalls being swept up in the “effective altruism” movement.
Effective altruism is a community of people “trying to figure out what practical things can be done in life to have the greatest possible positive impact on the world,” she says.
So, as Bankman-Fried recalls, he decided to go into banking, to make as much money as he could and channel it to good causes.
He learned stock trading during a short stint at a stock trading firm called Jane Street in New York. However, he got bored and decided to experiment with Bitcoin.
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He noticed variations in the value of Bitcoins on various cryptocurrency exchanges and started arbitraging, buying Bitcoins from places that sold them cheap and selling them to places that charged higher prices.
After a month of modest profits, he got together with some of his college friends and started a stock trading business called Alameda Research.
Bankman-Fried said the move hasn’t been easy and it has taken months to perfect techniques for moving money in and out of banks and across national borders.
However, after about three months, he and his small team had a lucky break.
“We’re very patient,” he said on the Jax Jones and Martin Warner Show podcast a year ago.
“We keep doing it. If someone tries to get in the way, we get creative and if our system can’t handle it, we build a new system to overcome the obstacle.”
As of January 2018, his team was earning US$1 million (about 15.5 billion rupees) every day.
A business reporter CNBC recently asked Bankman Fried what it’s like to make that kind of money.
Intellectually and methodologically, she says, “it makes perfect sense. But deep down, it surprises me every day,” she says.
Sam Bankman-Fried is officially a billionaire in 2021, thanks to his more high-profile side business, FTX.
Cryptocurrency exchange it has grown to become the second largest in the world and a giant in its industry, with daily trade reaching 10-15 billion US dollars (about 1.553-2.329 trillion rupees).
I often sleep on beanbags, Bankman-Fried told his Twitter followers.
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Times of success
As of early 2022, FTX was valued at $32 billion and was a popular brand, until it was used for NBA stadium names and received endorsements from celebrities like the NFL’s Tom Brady.
Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried seems to enjoy telling his Twitter followers about his lifestyle.
He often sleeps on an ottoman next to his office desk, he said, with a photo of him lounging next to his staff, near their devices.
Elsewhere, he made a post in the wee hours of the morning. “Couldn’t sleep. I’m going back to the office,” she wrote.
Bankman-Fried’s dream of donating large sums of money to charity is also going well.
In the interview BBC radio last month he said he had given away “several hundred million so far”.
His generosity doesn’t just go to charities, in the last six months, the “King of Crypto” has been given another nickname: “White Knight of Crypto”.
Read also: Criminal gangs in Brazil use Crypto Asep to launder money from illegal gold mines
It happened when the price of cryptocurrencies crashed in 2022, when the so-called “Crypto Winter” was reaching its peak.
While other companies in the industry faltered, Bankman-Fried handed out bailouts worth hundreds of millions.
When asked why he was trying to shore up bankrupt crypto companies, he said CNBC: “It won’t be good in the long run, if we have real losses and damages. And that’s not fair to the customer.”
He also claims, in the same interview, that he has $2 billion in reserves, which he can use to help bankrupt companies.
But in the first weeks of November 2022, he himself was touring the same industry, trying to raise money to save his company and clients.
Questions about FTX’s true financial stability began to circulate long after an article on the CoinDesk website pointed out that trading giant Bankman-Fried Alameda Research rests on a foundation composed mostly of coins from subsidiary FTX, not independent assets.
Further allegations that Alameda Research used FTX client deposits as trading loans were published in the Wall Street Journal.
The beginning of the end of this bankruptcy story began when FTX’s main competitor Binance publicly sold all of its FTX-related crypto tokens a few days later.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao told his 7.5 million followers that his firm will sell the company’s assets at a lower price, “in light of recent revelations.”
The tweet prompted FTX investors to flee. Panicked customers are withdrawing billions of dollars from cryptocurrency exchange That.
As a result, the company has decided to stop its withdrawal and Bankman-Fried has been trying to get a bailout. As for Binance, it publicly considered buying all the shares at one point, but ultimately backed off.
Binance chief Changpeng Zhao once tweeted about Binance’s steps to liquidate all FTX crypto tokens.
Binance said reports of “mishandled client funds and suspicious U.S. agency investigations” influenced its decision.
A day later, FTX was declared bankrupt.
Bankman-Fried apologized in a series of tweets saying: “I’m really sorry, again, we ended up here.
“Hopefully there are ways to bounce back. Hopefully this can bring them transparency, trust and governance.”
He also said he was “shocked to see things taken apart quickly.”
This is the world of cryptocurrencies. The price of Bitcoin has fallen to its lowest level in two years and many are wondering: If FTX can fall with its magic leader, what happens next?
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