FTT coins, the same coins that entitled owners to a third of FTX’s annual profits, initially fetched roughly .5 cents per. Wrapped in the latter, along with the recent private valuation of Anthropic at $1 trillion, is puzzlement about Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) present incarceration.
SBF was of course convicted for having stolen $8 billion from customers, but the direction of FTT coins after their initial issuance in 2019, along with Anthropic's previously mentioned private valuation, yet again calls the conviction into question. To see why, consider the historical price action of FTT coins.
Though they exchanged for as little .5 cents upon issuance, we find in Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite that eventually the coins began a remarkable ascent. Soon enough they exchanged for $1.50, and eventually, as of September of 2021, they exchanged for as much as $85.
It’s notable that when FTX imploded in 2022, of the funds on Alameda Research’s (the hedge fund SBF ran concurrent with FTX) books, Lewis reported that “more than a third of the assets were FTT.” Here’s the puzzlement.
From the FTT coins we see that as opposed to customers placing money with FTX for safekeeping, they were more realistically investing in SBF’s vision of the crypto and technology future, with the coins acting as shares in SBF’s vision. It’s insinuated to this day that SBF stole customer savings, and that’s surely what he was convicted of doing, but the conviction is difficult to countenance relative to the previously mentioned increase in the value of FTT tokens, along with investments SBF made with customer deposits.
To see why, it’s worth asking why - assuming FTX customers had placed money with the exchange for safekeeping – SBF wasn’t arrested long before 2022, and particularly as FTT tokens reached their all-time $85/token high? It seems in the question we find the answer to what FTX customers were doing in placing money in their FTX accounts.
This was all about them once again buying shares in a crypto and technology investment vehicle that SBF would oversee. How else to explain the lack of alarm among customers as the value of their "savings" went skyward? And if not customers up in arms, why not authorities associated with the law?
Which brings us to Anthropic. SBF invested $500 million in the then unknown AI concept in 2022. A basic extrapolation indicates that the stake SBF purchased in 2022 would be worth $200 billion today. Unfortunately for SBF, and the account holders he was convicted of having stolen from, the stake acquired by SBF in April of 2022 was sold for $1.5 billion during the FTX bankruptcy proceedings.
Fast forward to the present, and it scrambles the mind to imagine what FTT tokens would be worth today absent FTX’s forced bankruptcy. It also raises puzzlement yet again about what SBF was charged with and why.
Put another way, what if crypto and other technology assets hadn’t taken a near-term dive in late 2022? If not, is it a reach to suggest that SBF not only never would have been arrested, but that as you’re reading this he would rate the descriptor not of an incarcerated criminal, but as one of the richest, most visionary investors in the world?
