Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried stands as the founder of the FTX exchange as well as Alameda Research. The man has also managed to make a fortune, doing so mostly by way of crypto assets within these past few years. This comes according to the New York Magazine.
Gaining $10 Billion Through Mostly Crypto
SBF had spoken to this publication regarding his journey into the crypto industry at large, having started back in 2018. This interview had SBF admit that he has an estimated net worth of an eye-bulging $10 billion, with the majority of this worth being in illiquid assets.
SBF himself was a quant trader at Wall street prior to going into crypto trading back in 2018. This shift was thanks to SBF noticing the massive opportunities within the arbitrage market. From there, he started to develop a method in order to exploit this “Kimchi premium,” which is a price difference of Bitcoin between the world and Korea.
Pushing Into New Territory
With restrictions placed in Korea, SBF promptly moved to Japan, and had managed to move up to $25 million each day. He pulled this off by way of local banks and intermediaries when the price discrepancy was at its height, according to the report.
SBF now boasts a crypto empire with a $2 billion a day turnover, operating under the Alameda Research umbrella. With such a significant market power, SBF’s current focus is centered around the FTX crypto derivative exchange and Serum, a DeFi Project based within the Solana blockchain.
It was back in January of this year with the FTX Token (FTT) saw itself rally by more than 100%. This caused the exchange to push past the open interest of both Deribit and BitMEX. As it stands now, however, the token is within a cooling-off period, having gone to an all-time high of $13.60.
Working With The Current Environment
SBF himself managed to garner the attention of mainstream media last year. This was when he had made a donation to the political election campaign of Joe Biden, doing so by the tune of $5.2 million. This made SBF the second-largest contributor to the Biden campaign, beaten only by Micheal Bloomberg. He cited the Biden team’s “decision-making process and generic stability” when it comes to what motivated him to support Biden.
Not to be outdone, FTX has opted to create a Wall Streets Bets index, which included assets from AMC, GME, as well as DOGE.
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