Is This a Smart Business to Launch?

Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder of crypto exchange FTX, joins The Scoop to close out 2021 in a two-part episode that explores the origin story of the increasingly ubiquitous trading venue, Bankman-Fried's worldview, and what he expects for the digital asset market in the year to come.

We begin with Part 1, during which the former Jane Street trader and Stanford graduate harkens back to the precious beginnings of FTX, spun out of Alameda Research, a trading firm he also founded. 

Bankman-Fried also explained why the firm was launched in the first place back in 2019. 

“What it really was, was saying, OK here’s a business [that’s] making $1 billion-plus a year collectively at the time, which we understand deeply,” he said. “They were just not well built. The number of problems they had were enormous. Losing millions of dollars a day in customer funds ... the risk engines just didn’t work. And you could see why.”

As Bankman-Fried recalled, some back-of-envelope math played a role in the decision-making process. He said he considered what the expected value of an exchange could be and figured that the odds of success were non-trivial:

"I don’t know exactly how high, but definitely not close to zero, so fuck, it let’s do it. That was basically the chain of logic there. Eighty percent chance we fail to ever get a user. If we do get users then there is a 50% chance that it goes pretty well.”

Disclaimer: Beginning in 2021, Michael McCaffrey, the former CEO and majority owner of The Block, took a series of loans from founder and former FTX and Alameda CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McCaffrey resigned from the company in December 2022 after failing to disclose those transactions.

Episode 85 of Season 3 of The Scoop was recorded remotely with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX.

Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Email feedback and revision requests to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Bakkt, Kraken and Kava

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