Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

To me, it didn’t really seem like a fuckup. Even if I believed that he misplaced and accidentally spent $8 billion, he had already told me that Alameda had been allowed to violate FTX’s margin rules. This wasn’t some little technical thing. He was so proud of FTX’s margining system that he’d been lobbying regulators for it to be used on U.S. exchanges instead of traditional safeguards. Bankman-Fried himself had said that exchanges should never extend credit to a fund and put other customers’ assets at risk. He wrote on Twitter that the idea an exchange would even have that discretion was “scary.” I read him the tweets and asked: “Isn’t that, like, exactly what you did, right around that time?” “Yeah, I guess that’s kind of fair,” he said. Then he seemed to claim that this was evidence the rules he was lobbying for were a good idea. “I think this is one of the things that would have stopped.” “You had a rule on your platform. You didn’t follow it,” I said.