X Close

How SBF killed crypto The days of financial anarchy are over

Did he single-handedly destroy crypto's reputation? (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Did he single-handedly destroy crypto's reputation? (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)


November 20, 2023   6 mins

On 2 November, the verdict finally came down. Sam Bankman-Fried ā€” the fallen crypto king ā€” had been found guilty of seven charges of federal fraud. The courtroom at 500 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan sat in silence as SBF, shorn of his normal tousled hair, heard his fate. ā€œGuiltyā€, the jury forewoman said over and over, confirming what most watchers already knew (but SBF had long failed to accept). After a month of damning testimony from his former associates and friends, it was clear: SBF had swindled his customers at FTX, the crypto empire he founded, out of $8 billion. And, heā€™d used this money to fund a lifestyle of excess, wild deal-making and epic influence-peddling. SBF, still only 31, could now face 115 years in prison, though heā€™s more likely to get around 20 when heā€™s sentenced in March next year.

Strangely, 2 November was the exact day, a year earlier, that CoinDesk ā€” the news organisation where I work ā€” had broken the story that precipitated the fall. Ian Allisonā€™s scoop showed that much of the balance sheet propelling FTX (through its hedge fund, Alameda Trading) was composed of a stablecoin token (FTT) that FTX itself had created. In effect, our reporting showed, FTX had been swapping real peopleā€™s real money for a coin with little liquidity and no intrinsic value. And, as the trial would reveal, even this balance sheet was a fiction created by Alamedaā€™s chief, Caroline Ellison, to make FTX look healthier than it actually was.

This was fraud, pure and simple. And over the month of the trial, SBF has been turned into the white-collar criminal par excellence, all by the same media that once fĆŖted and foregrounded him as a charming eccentric. But, though his personal foibles have come to dominate coverage, SBFā€™s downfall has also been seen as a parable for the entire crypto industry. Our original story set off a tailspin of valuations and crypto prices that is only today righting itself, and the fall of FTX hurt cryptoā€™s reputation among the public and regulators ā€” particularly in Washington D.C., which has turned viciously on the industry and its apologists. The jury on Pearl took just three hours to reach its unanimous verdict, and to many the conclusion was peremptorily clear: crypto was and is a scam, just as SBF and FTX were. For the faithful within the crypto industry, this is a terrifying conclusion. Was FTX really representative of the fundamental wrongness of crypto, an industry that literally creates money out of thin air, as SBF had done with FTT? Or, was FTX, in fact, just a story of immature corporate governance, of structural forces that keep allowing boy-wonders like SBF to do terrible things?

Iā€™ve covered the crypto/blockchain/web3 space as a journalist since 2014, and this is far from the first scandal itā€™s seen. In fact, long before SBF, I thought Iā€™d seen every flavour of exotic financial scam going. The stories behind ā€œBitConnectā€, ā€œOnecoinā€, ā€œQuadrigaCXā€, and ā€œMt. Goxā€ are notorious, and the losses staggering. The Onecoin Ponzi scheme, for instance, started in Bulgaria and fleeced victims of $4 billion. The main perpetrator was one Ruja Ignatova ā€” aka the CryptoQueen ā€” who went missing for years after the scam was first discovered in 2017. She is now thought to have been murdered on a yacht by a drug lord, her remains scattered into the Ionian Sea. QuadrigaCX was a mid-size crypto exchange operating in Canada in the mid-2010s, until its founder, Gerald Cotten, died in mysterious circumstances while on a trip to India in 2019. With his death, $145 million in tokens stored on the exchange inexplicably went offline, apparently missing forever.

Covering these and many such stories was fun. The characters were outsized (BitConnectā€™s Carlos Matosā€™s speech to an investor crowd in Thailand became an era-defining meme). And the claims they made for themselves were always outlandish, from ā€œyouā€™re going to get rich!ā€ to ā€œweā€™re going to save the worldā€. A lot of the journalists covering crypto at the time believed in the underlying technology and the message of decentralisation (that banks, governments and Silicon Valley fundamentally do have too much control over our lives). But we didnā€™t take the industry overly seriously, because the actors involved were often not serious about following through on their promises. Crypto was an entertaining sideshow to the mainstream events happening in finance and business.

By the time SBF came along, emerging as a boy-genius during Covid, it seemed like much of the fun-and-games was over. Crypto had grown up. Its leading companies, like Coinbase, had gone public, sanitised of their earlier ideological commitments of banking-the-unbanked and usurping central banks in controlling the money supply. The industry had disciplined advocates in Washington. Its leaders were part of the financial establishment, still on the margins to be sure, but not in the way the cypherpunks ā€” the community of Nineties-era digital anarchists who gave rise to Bitcoin ā€” were outside society. They had believed in utterly breaking the banks following the 2008 financial crisis, not in getting Wall Streetā€™s assent to reshape finance for the digital age.

Then, in November 2022, salacious details about SBF/FTX began to emerge on the back of our story. SBF had been running a ā€œcabalā€ of former roommates (several of whom, it was speculated, had been involved in a polyamorous tryst) out of a lavish compound in the Bahamas. It had no accounting department or risk manager, despite being a $32 billion company in an infamously risky industry. Still, many aspects of FTX made it a different type of scandal to BitConnect and the rest. SBFā€™s organisation had been taken seriously by serious people, including the regulators and many high-profile politicians. It had investors from blue-blooded Silicon Valley firms and it presented itself as part of the next wave of crypto development: sober, measured, media-savvy, and politically connected.

BitConnect, Onecoin, QuadrigaCX et al. had never made it onto the front cover of Forbes or Fortune. The founders of these enterprises didnā€™t appear before Congressional committees, as SBF was wont to do, to argue for the industryā€™s interests. They never had private meetings with the chairman of the SEC to argue for favourable treatment. They never paid off one third of Congress ā€” almost 200 representatives and senators. They never appeared in primetime ads, and on-stage, with A-listers like seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady, Larry David or President Bill Clinton. And they certainly never paid to rename football and baseball stadiums with their brand. This was a different crowd to the old bad boys of crypto.

SBFā€™s need for attention from the media and the political class is one reason why heā€™s now taking such a rap for the industryā€™s failings. He brought it on himself. SBF, who dressed and acted in a casual way that reporters tended to like, was a media addict who revelled in his ā€œking of cryptoā€ status. He gave out his cell number to anyone who would listen to him, making himself available for comment at odd times, day and night. He never missed an opportunity to make a potentially viral TikTok video or eke out a little more airtime. Even after FTXā€™s collapse, he was still calling up every reporter he knew to try and press his innocence, even as every defence lawyer told him to stay quiet.

So, when the New York Times said that crypto was on trial in the SBF case, it was not entirely unreasonable (though definitely misleading). He was the face of crypto for a couple of years. But, to many in the industry, SBFā€™s incarceration proves little, because he was never a true believer. SBF never advocated for true decentralisation, as hardened Bitcoiners do. And, when he was palling around D.C. salons in 2021 and 2022, he was largely speaking for his own company, rather than for the industry as a whole. These people point out that the fraud was committed largely in dollars, rather than crypto, and it could have happened in any industry thatā€™s lightly regulated and supervised. Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes and the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 managed fine without any Bitcoin or stablecoins changing hands.

But SBF really was supposed to be the chosen one who could make crypto safe for everyday users. As new laws and regulators come down in the wake of FTX, SBF may have achieved that goal, but not in the way he intended. Today, the words ā€œcryptoā€ and ā€œWeb3ā€ are losing their currency, replaced by a legalistic vocabulary of ā€œdigital assetsā€ and ā€œtokenisationā€. Intermediaries that hold crypto assets, like exchanges, now have to attest to their reserves, so itā€™s clear that people like SBF are not making off with peopleā€™s money for their own enjoyment. Crypto is less about financial freedom and wild speculation around funny sounding meme-coins (like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu) and more about ā€œreal-world assetsā€, such as treasury bonds and stocks.

Wall Street is gradually incorporating crypto into the wide financial nexus in subtle ways, exerting control over future regulation and controls. The T-shirt wearing Bitcoiners, who gave rise to the industry and made it culturally interesting, are being sidelined in favour of suits and compliance officers. This all makes the industry less fun to cover and less scandalous. But it also probably means that crypto is on safer ground: more trustworthy and predictable, and less volatile. SBF was part of a wave of crypto-sanitisers who aim was to move crypto from the anarchic fringe to the mainstream. His accidental legacy may be to make it more like the rest of finance ā€” safe for grandma and relatively boring.


Ben SchillerĀ is the managing editor for features and opinion at CoinDesk, a news site specialising in Bitcoin and digital currencies.

btschiller

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

25 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Martin M
Martin M
1 year ago

The fact that crypto is essentially created using “smoke and mirrors” means it lend itself to scams like this. Once the Wall Street “suits” become involved, the scams may become more sophisticated, but there will still be plenty of them.

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
1 year ago

I’ve always been amused that the crypto fans tend to be vociferously anti-fiat currency, when crypto is the apotheosis of fiat. I mean, at least the dollar is based by the full faith and credit of the United States government, for what little that’s worth. Crypto is backed by nothing at all.

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago

With its innately limited supply (no BoE or Fed can just ‘print’ more of them) Bitcoin has the sort of anchor that used to be provided by gold convertibility. So while it may indeed be backed by nothing tangible at all, nothing at all is still a far stronger backing than ‘the full faith and credit of the US government’, which can and will carry on issuing trillions more dollars until its currency finally collapses – and it won’t be long now – to the value of the Turkish lira, Argentine peso or Zimbabwe dollar.

Last edited 1 year ago by Peter Joy
Martin M
Martin M
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Joy

My toenail clippings have an “innately limited supply”, but I don’t suggest that they form the basis of a system of exchange. The fact is that we don’t even know who established Bitcoin, or for what (most likely nefarious) purpose they did so.

Bernard Stewart
Bernard Stewart
1 year ago
Reply to  Martin M

Your toenails: so far so good, but I don’t know how in practice people would use your toenails as a medium of exchange, except within your village, while this is possible globally with bitcoin. This is surely part of the value of bitcoin, that it is usable in this way, as well as being in finite supply. Point taken about the origin of bitcoin.

Martin M
Martin M
11 months ago

I can issue tokens backed by my holdings of toenail clippings.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Joy

Pretty funny people dont understand this part.

Andrzej Wasniewski
Andrzej Wasniewski
1 year ago

I am not really sure if the author understands the difference between crypto and Bitcoin, I generally find the level of European ignorance about crypto, Bitcoin and stablecoin a bit disconcerting. FTX collapse, and hopefully coming demise of other scrypto scams is the prerequisite of wide adoption of Bitcoin either through self custody or through spot ETF (Blackrock, Fidelity etc).

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
1 year ago

Europe is now a technology backwater. The ripple effect that transfers technical knowledge into wider society is much reduced when the centre of the splash is on another continent. Consequently European non-technical commentators on technology are often quite clueless compared to their peers in Asia and the USA.

Martin M
Martin M
1 year ago

Bitcoin is better why? Oh that’s right! Because we don’t even know who set it up, or why they did so! If that hasn’t got “scam” written all over it, I don’t know what has!

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago

As I write, one Bitcoin trades at $37,560. I expect Mr Schiller is quite right about the numerous well-advertised ersatz scamcoins that surfed in on its wake. But Bitcoin – with its innately limited supply – has held up just fine and continues to appreciate against the fiat US dollar, which since President Nixon ended gold convertibility in 1971 has become a scam that makes SBF and FTX look like small change.

Martin M
Martin M
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Joy

Yes, that is interesting, given that it has precisely one “real world” use, namely facilitating illegal transactions. It pretty much came to public notice as the payment method for the (now long defunct) Silk Road marketplace.

Alex Colchester
Alex Colchester
1 year ago
Reply to  Peter Joy

Great points- as you have alluded to, what people donā€™t seem to understand is that FTX is no more a damning indictment on crypto, than someone pretending to store customers gold (which they had actually lost gambling) is a damning indictment on the universal value and usefulness of gold.
What really will begin to blow peopleā€™s minds is when they begin to join the dots and see how the Federal Reserve is actually doing exactly that.

Lynwen Brown
Lynwen Brown
1 year ago

“Not your keys, not your coins.” SBF was always a middle man fraudster. Crypto was made to cut out the middle men with de-centralised exchanges and trustless code. People willing to learn about true crypto will do well, but people who still entrust their money to the middle men will not.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 year ago

The FTX token (FTT) isn’t/wasn’t a stablecoin?

Tony Kilmister
Tony Kilmister
1 year ago

An endearing aspect of the crypto scandals is how the victims, in the main, are the right sorts of people: insiders, ideologues, donation desperate politicians, dumb celebrities, organised crime and so on.

Yet it is a fascinating phenomenon from a political economy perspective. The early-mover libertarians with their bedroom-hatched fantasies of crypto heralding a future of decentralised commodity exchange free of state-sanctioned money forms were always laughable. More interesting is how cryptocurrency schemes have managed to attract fiat currency support from supposedly serious institutions and people. Why? No goods, services or capital goods are produced. Itā€™s a zero sum game: crypto enrichment is someone elseā€™s loss. Looks awfully like a rent extraction scheme.

Never thought Iā€™d need to return to Marxā€™s Capital. But, the concept of ā€˜fictitious capitalā€™ appeals: the imperative of capital accumulation having a tendency to free itself from the inconvenience of needing to produce things for use. Big fund management outfits are reportedly seeking to institutionalise crypto ā€˜investmentā€™ via ETFs. Capitalism eh?

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Kilmister

Laughable? As I posted above, one single Bitcoin would this afternoon cost you more than $37,000 of the Fed’s paper IOUs. US National Debt is closing in on $34 trillion and is now turning parabolic. Rising interest rates, caused by loss of confidence in the US ability to service this debt, are biting deeper and deeper into the US Federal budget. In short, the dollar – and the currencies of other unproductive western economies – are going to crash. When that happens, one Bitcoin will cost you $100,000, maybe $250,000, maybe more.

Last edited 1 year ago by Peter Joy
Martin M
Martin M
1 year ago
Reply to  Tony Kilmister

Speaking for myself, I have zero sympathy for any “investor” who has lost money on a crypto scam, or has lost the password to their crypto “wallet”.

Amy Harris
Amy Harris
1 year ago

ā€œWas FTX really representative of the fundamental wrongness of crypto, an industry that literally creates money out of thin air, as SBF had done with FTT? Or, was FTX, in fact, just a story of immature corporate governance, of structural forces that keep allowing boy-wonders like SBF to do terrible things?ā€œ

Both are true, itā€™s not ā€œeither/orā€, both are true.

Martin M
Martin M
1 year ago
Reply to  Amy Harris

Crypto lends itself to abuse by the SBFs of this world though, because of its lack of regulation, and its inherent nebulousness.

John Riordan
John Riordan
1 year ago

The article contradicts the headline somewhat. SBF can hardly have “killed” crypto if cryptos are now being brought into mainstream finance, as the article says.
BTC is now worth about Ā£30,000, and even if it never rises above that level from now on, it is a stellar success as an asset class.

Alex Colchester
Alex Colchester
1 year ago

By definition Wall Street canā€™t ā€˜move inā€™ on crypto. If a middleman is needed for crypto then it isnā€™t really crypto. This is the whole point. All the scams exist in the middleman space. I.e exchanges. Whether completely fictitious (onecoin) or just fraudulent (FTX) if you need a middleman then you arenā€™t involved in crypto, you are involved in derivatives. True crypto is a bearer instrument AND is fungible. No middleman required. Buy some Monero (thank me later).

Last edited 1 year ago by Alex Colchester
Mike Forsdike
Mike Forsdike
1 year ago

Iā€™m sure with $4B of stolen money I could arrange my own fake death like the (late) CryptoQueen.

mclaughlin freeman
mclaughlin freeman
1 year ago
Reply to  Mike Forsdike

As the crypto/blockchain/web3 space continues to evolve, it’s crucial for investors to remain vigilant a small world cup and conduct thorough research before investing in any project.

Last edited 1 year ago by mclaughlin freeman
Martin M
Martin M
11 months ago

Was FTX really representative of the fundamental wrongness of crypto, an industry that literally creates money out of thin air, as SBF had done with FTT? Or, was FTX, in fact, just a story of immature corporate governance, of structural forces that keep allowing boy-wonders like SBF to do terrible things?
The first one, definitely. What do you expect when you let dishonest types loose in an unregulated industry centered around trading in “assets” created using smoke and mirrors?