Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

The bulk of the customers’ money inside of Alameda that should have been inside FTX—$8.8 billion of it, to be exact—resided in an account that Alameda had labeled fiat@. The fiat@ account had been set up in 2019 to receive the dollars and other fiat currencies sent by FTX’s new customers. Alameda Research had created the account only after FTX had been unable to get its own bank accounts. Back in 2019, no real bank in the United States had been willing to offer its services to a new international crypto exchange. The crypto entities that they did bank, like Alameda Research, usually disguised their association with crypto. The biggest US crypto exchange, Coinbase, had by some miracle persuaded Silicon Valley Bank to give it an account—and thus a mechanism for Coinbase to receive US dollars from, and send US dollars to, its crypto trading customers. A US bank account had thereby given Coinbase a big advantage, but how exactly they’d obtained the account was a story for another day; the story for this day is how FTX failed to find its own US bank for sending and receiving dollars. From its founding in the spring of 2019 until July 2021, when it finally persuaded a bank in San Diego called Silvergate Capital¶ to open an account in its name, FTX had no straightforward way to accept dollar deposits. In Sam’s telling, the dollars sent in by customers that had accumulated inside of Alameda Research had simply never been moved.