SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy

By Brady Dale

A first-hand look at the extraordinary collapse of FTX, Alameda Research, and Sam Bankman-Fried

In SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy, accomplished crypto reporter Brady Dale presents an engrossing take on the spectacular and sudden implosion of FTX, Alameda Research, and their associated companies, as well as the criminal indictments of Sam Bankman-Fried and several of his associates. In the book, you’ll go beyond the salacious details and tawdry gossip to grasp the real lessons to be learned from one of the most dramatic corporate failures in living memory.

The author explores:

• The often-confusing world of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance, offering a deep understanding of both industries
• The history of Sam Bankman-Fried, what smart money players had to say about him in 2019 and 2020, and why many decentralized finance professionals considered him a “pirate” even before FTX and Alameda blew up
• What the aggressive lobbying campaigns waged by FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried reveal about the latter’s motives and goals

An extraordinary account of almost unimaginable wealth, greed, and hubris, SBF is a can’t-miss account of a fascinating corporate tragedy that continues to unfold to this very day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781394196074

Book preview

Prologue

One of the things I've learned as a journalist is something I can't quite explain, even really to myself. It's a thing I know, but putting it in words is harder.

But it's something like this: Sometimes I will try to report a story, based on the fact that I know something has happened. What I want to know is the how and why of that event.

The thing, the happening that broke into public view, is maybe 5 or 10 percent of the story. And from that little piece, I think I know two or three ways that it could possibly be explained. It doesn't seem like it could be explained by anything else.

But then you learn maybe 30 or 50 percent of the story. You're still not all the way there, but you realize that there was so much that you just couldn't see when you only had 5 to 10 percent. It looks now like you were blind then.

That's not the part that's hard to explain.

This is: Now that you know more than you knew then, you also can't even identify with yourself and the way you once saw it. It's hard to even see how you ever thought those explanations could be right. Maybe you can't even remember them. That simplicity slips from the set of possibilities.

So here's my point: this book is a reel of film from late 2022. It's an attempt to capture what we think we know about Sam Bankman‐Fried, the FTX conglomerate, and the crypto industry, up through to the point of his indictment, arrest, and extradition back to the US, when facts were still fuzzy and emotions were running hot.

Honestly, even that was such a turning point that the whole prior set of feelings and impressions have already vanished.

But it looks like there will be a trial, and when that happens it will layer on so many new facts that this time, this way of understanding will be washed out as if it never was. But it is part of the larger story, and this book will preserve some portion of that, because this is a crucial moment in this still nascent history. If cryptocurrencies persist, people are definitely going to wonder what it looked like from now.

So here goes.

There's a lot I still don't know as I finish this.

But we do know a lot, and I hope putting it together and adding some new pieces of it here can help all of us see more clearly what we can know about it so far. We don't know everything yet, nor even close to everything I suspect we will.

Some notes on the reporting before we start.

First, Sam Bankman‐Fried is our subject. In these pages, he will be familiar to you, so I'm going to call him SBF or Sam. That's not because I'm his friend or ever was, but it's how he's known.

I have never met Sam in person, but we talked a few times on the phone. I used to ask him for comment on stories I was working on via email or over Telegram regularly.

Much of this story is a story I know from covering the space since 2015, full time since 2017. Nonetheless, I can back up my own knowledge with actual reporting at the time from news organizations. Quite a bit of that reporting has been my own.

After each chapter, I note accounts that I either referenced or used to double check my memory. They are listed in roughly the order they show up in the chapter (though some are used more than once, obviously).

I also did a lot of interviews for this. In a few cases, I agreed to keep people's identity out of the story because it makes a lot of people nervous in various ways: legally, reputationally, etc. See more details about interviews in the notes.

Many comments in the story come from Twitter. A lot of crypto culture, discourse, decision‐making, and even dealmaking happens on Twitter. That's the way we live now. The addresses of all the tweets are shown in the chapter notes. Similarly, when I have had to use the Internet Archive for sources, the full address is given.

In general, I have left internet‐speak as is, unless I really felt like readers wouldn't get, for example, an abbreviation. In those cases, I spelled it out or added a footnote. I also fixed some obvious misspellings in comments found online.

In quotes, I've removed filler words, such as like, and umm and pointless repetition that bought the speaker time to think. Sometimes such words, especially like, seemed more important than other times, as if there were some meaning there. This has been subjective, but the essential meanings of the statements have been unchanged by including them or erasing them.

This book uses the complaints from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission extensively (less so the Department of Justice indictment, because it said the least though probably matters the most). It's important to note here that these are all still allegations. Evidence hasn't been presented, and a court hasn't weighed in.

Complaints aren't always right, and evidence can come to light that clears defendants, but these complaints in many ways support the account of prior sources.

However, SBF and his colleagues are all innocent until proven guilty. Everything presented here that seems inappropriate or criminal should be considered allegations. There is a lot that no one seems to know yet.

And crucially, this book isn't an attempt at a trial in prose. The courts will decide what they decide, undoubtedly concerning a narrow set of questions. Storytelling considers broad questions, to help us all grow our understanding of how humans relate, coordinate, and resolve disputes in an ever more abstracted world.

Much of this book concerns cryptocurrency, which raises perennial questions of style. The standards around how to write out the names of cryptocurrencies are still being debated. To me, cryptocurrency is money, so when I'm talking about tokens or coins as money, I write them lower case as I would any currency: bitcoins and dogecoins are treated just as I would dollars or euros.

Cryptocurrencies all have ticker symbols, like stocks do. So on first mention I will write the name and the ticker in parentheses, such as ether (ETH), dai (DAI), terra usd (UST).

All cryptocurrencies run on a blockchain or protocol of some kind, so when I'm referring to the blockchain or smart contract itself, I will use uppercase: Solana, SushiSwap, Yearn, Ethereum.

Sometimes the name of the protocol and the token are the same, so this should help show the different sense being used. Example: Bitcoin the blockchain versus bitcoin the asset that makes that blockchain work.

Inevitably, these things become muddled in places. The way to write clearly and consistently about cryptocurrency remains a work in progress.

As I wrote this entire book, I was waiting to actually speak with SBF. Every day I worked on it, I became more and more convinced that his guilty plea was inevitable, that the evidence was too overwhelming.

The day of my deadline to Wiley, December 30, 2022, I had completed what I thought was my final draft of the book, but then I got a chance to speak with SBF. When I asked him about the fact that complaints from various agencies seemed to confirm that Alameda and FTX had collaborated in using customer funds inappropriately, he said:

It's interesting that they seem so confident in claiming that, given that I'm pretty confident that they have extremely little data to go on right now as evidenced by the fact that none of it was in the various complaints.

He then reiterated points he's been making thus far about what went wrong. His story hasn't shifted since the complaints came out, so I'll get to what he told me about all of that when it's appropriate. But he also said this:

In terms of facing the future, I think I'm just gonna tell the truth and see what happens. And I certainly don't agree with the public narrative, but that's not for me to decide at the end of the day. I think, like, my biggest concern is that the incredibly toxic media environment will mean that there's no way for me to have a fair trial. And that no matter what happens, there will be too much political and public pressure to find me guilty. And that it won't matter what really happened.

I did not have much success reaching other executives from FTX and its related companies, for reasons that are probably obvious. It's been a surprise to everyone that the founder has said as much as he has.

Source Referenced

Interview, Sam Bankman‐Fried, phone call interview with spokesperson, Dec. 30, 2022.

Timeline

From media accounts that have not been disputed by FTX or its affiliates. Where it's from allegations in CFTC or SEC complaints, that's noted.

2017

Jan. 1. Bitcoin price breaks $1,000 for the first time since 2013.

Oct. or Nov. Alameda founded in Berkeley (CFTC). Gary Wang and Tara MacAulay are early leaders.

Dec. Nishad Singh joins.

Dec. 17. New bitcoin all‐time high, $19,783.

2018

Jan. SBF presents Alameda to notable crypto investors in San Francisco.

March. Caroline Ellison joins Alameda (SEC) from Jane Street.

April. MacAulay and many other associates from the EA movement leave and take a large amount of capital with them.

Late. They begin work on a derivatives exchange that would become FTX (CFTC).

Dec. 15. Bitcoin's nadir, at $3,236.

2019

Early. Team moves to Hong Kong.

May. FTX begins. Deposits to FTX are made into an Alameda Bank Account opened in the name of North Dimension, accounted for manually into customer accounts at FTX.

July 19. FTX launches the ftt token (SEC).

Aug. $8 million series A for FTX (SEC). Code is written to allow Alameda to have a negative balance on FTX (SEC).

Nov. Binance gets 20% stake (CFTC) (could be the same terms as August)

2020

Jan. FTX US established (CFTC)

March. Solana launches beta.

May. Negative balance code is updated (SEC). FTX US goes live.

Aug. FTX acquires Blockfolio. FTX finally has its own bank account, but never moves prior FTX deposits to Alameda over to that account, leaving $8 billion behind (CFTC). SushiSwap announces vampire attack on Uniswap.

Sept. SBF steps in to steward the migration of Uniswap deposits to SushiSwap, becoming a public face in DeFi for the first time.

2021

Jan. Maps.me whitepaper lists SBF as an advisor.

Feb. Ren, a bitcoin derivatives start‐up, joins FTX.

May. Brett Harrison starts at FTX US.

July. Binance and FTX break up; Binance receives large stake of ftt as part of its buyout. CZ and Sequoia invests in Series B, $900M in at $18B valuation, with a $1 billion investment (SEC)

Oct. Oct. FTX US acquires LedgerX (CFTC). SBF hands over control of Alameda to Sam and Caroline. Meme round: $420M from 69 investors.

Nov. 10. Bitcoin all‐time high of $69,044.

Dec. $719 billion in spot trading volume on FTX.

2022

Jan. Bitcoin falls below $40,000 for the first time. $500 million series C for FTX. FTX Ventures is announced, led by Amy Wu, from Lightspeed Ventures.

Feb. DOJ announces arrest of couple holding stolen Bitfinex bitcoin. Solana blockchain bridge to Ethereum, Wormhole, exploited for over $300 million.

Mar. Federal funds rate increases for the first time since Dec. 2018.

April. Groundbreaking of new FTX HQ in Nassau. Crypto Bahamas, in collaboration with SALT.

May. The Terra stablecoin unravels. The gradual correction in crypto markets becomes more acute. Alameda draws on its secret line of credit at FTX to meet margin calls from lenders. The line of credit is hidden in FTX's accounts. (SEC). FTX appears at CFTC hearing to discuss its request to offer derivatives in the US. Bitcoin falls below $30,000 for the first time.

June. BlockFi spared from insolvency by $250 million line of credit arranged by SBF. Coinbase announces layoffs. Alameda research offers financing to Voyager Digital. Bitcoin falls below $20,000 for the first time.

June to late July 2022. Alameda still the largest depositor of stablecoins.

July. Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital files for bankruptcy. Crypto lender Celsius declares bankruptcy.

Aug. The first version of the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (the SBF bill) is introduced in the Senate. Treasury sanctions the Tornado Cash smart contract on Ethereum. Sam Trabucco steps down as co‐CEO of Alameda Research.

Sept. Brett Harrison steps down as president of FTX US. SBF circulates a memo on shutting down Alameda internally (CFTC).

Oct. Jonathan Cheeseman leaves FTX as head of overt‐the‐counter trading. Mango Markets' smart contracts exploited for over $100 million. SBF releases his Possible Digital Industry Standards blog post, setting off a bitter controversy.

Nov.

2nd. CoinDesk posts its story about Alameda's balance sheet.

6th. Binance CEO announces plans for it to liquidate its holdings of ftt from FTX's buyout of its original stake. Customers begin leaving FTX.

7th. SBF tweets that FTX's assets are fine and that FTX does not invest customer assets.

8th. FTX announces Binance will acquire FTX. Election Day in the US.

9th. Binance cancels acquisition. $5 billion leaves FTX that day. Ryan Salame tips off Bahamas regulators that client funds had been misused to cover Alameda debts. Ellison tells Alameda staff about misuse of FTX customer funds and most resign.

10th. SBF tweets, among other things: I'm sorry. That's the biggest thing. I fucked up. Nishad Singh resigns.

11th. FTX declares bankruptcy, SBF resigns.

17th. New CEO submits the bankruptcies first day declaration to the US bankruptcy court in Delaware.

18th. Gary Wang and Caroline Ellison end their employment with FTX (SEC).

19th. Bitcoin hits its lowest price of 2022, $15,742.

28th. Crypto lender BlockFi declares bankruptcy.

Dec. 2022

SBF is arrested in the Bahamas and charged with multiple crimes, and the CFTC and SEC bring civil suits against the companies he ran.

SBF agrees to be extradited to the US, where he is released on bail, without a passport, and with an ankle bracelet.

Wang and Ellison agree to cooperate with prosecutors.

Chapter 1

I Want to Believe

I am drowning in Sam.

He's everywhere, and unlike any other CEO after a comparably colossal unwinding, he's not coming at me indirectly, via journalists searching out his history.

No, this deluge is him. He won't stop. It's as if he can't stop. I want to get the story of FTX down, but how can anyone discern it through all the noise that is him: that is Sam Bankman‐Fried? That is SBF. That nasally, excessively informed voice that just won't stop offering his version of events in his extra‐qualified statistically tinted mysticism.

These words are coming to you from somewhere around the halfway point of writing this book. It's December 1, 2022. Tonight, as my workday at Axios, the internet‐native news site, was ending, I was trying to make some time to do a little bit of research on companies that one of his companies, Alameda Research, has backed, but then I got a message on our Slack that SBF, the boy wonder who lost several billion dollars in crypto wealth, was doing a Twitter Spaces.

For those blessedly adrift from the gravity of Twitter, Spaces are where a few people can go online and talk with each other, no video, just voice, while dozens or hundreds or thousands of others just listen, interacting only with a few emoji. Spaces has become a big way for big accounts to broadcast. And SBF, since late November and here in early December 2022, was all about broadcasting.

This was after SBF had made a morning show appearance with George Stephanopoulous, which I haven’t then watched yet. And after a New York Times internet broadcast with Andrew Ross Sorkin, which I also haven’t watched yet. I am the only person I know in the media who hasn’t watched.

I am too busy writing this book to watch a thing I knew would be that will there when I am ready. I plan to watch it later. But now he is talking again, to some random faux‐investigators on Twitter in a wannabe Barbara Walters grilling I just have the misfortune of hearing.

I listened to a little of the Spaces, but it was more aggravation than information.

There was too much of him. I'm drowning.

Sam will not stop coming. People say this deluge is the masterpiece of public relations plotted out by warlock‐level flaks inducted into issue control dark arts.

But this view comes from mere witnesses of PR, perhaps its clients. This was not PR. PR is the sandstorm in which I've built my home. It's pointless pellets of banal sameness, a maelstrom in which I heave to inhale a few breaths of trustworthy observations. PR has a taste and a smell of risk aversion. What SBF was doing was not that.

This was him. This torrent sprung from his need. This was all Sam. So much Sam.

I am drowning in Sam.

— Dec. 1, 2022

***

Sam Bankman‐Fried offered a story that you wanted to believe. The talkative boy billionaire who would turn the wealth creation engine of cryptocurrency into a robber baron's war chest with which he could fix the world.

He would be like Andrew Carnegie with his libraries, and who doesn't like those libraries? There was one in my tiny little hometown in Southeast Kansas. It's beautiful.

But Andrew Carnegie paid for those libraries in part by—for example—hiring thugs to bust unionized workers trying to negotiate a better contract. Not great stuff, as it goes. Some of our grandparents paid for those libraries in lost wages.

But SBF wouldn't spin up a war chest from anything nasty like air pollution–belching factories and life‐threatening working conditions. SBF's war chest would be created off the internet, scratching wealth off like solid gold paint flecks from space money bouncing around something called a blockchain. Far from creating industrial scars in people's backyards, blockchains don't even seem real!

So if a good guy could come along and make his wealth off that and then help a whole lot of people with that money, where would the harm be?

It was an appealing way to see SBF. A lot of people got sucked into it. I got sucked into it—I believed that he believed the story he was telling. Bonnie Tyler sang it out in 1984, and we all feel today just as she did then: we're all holding out for a hero.

Let me ask you this question: What if we are all in fact better off for the fact that SBF never got a chance to take a crack at really going to town saving the world?

What if he was the very last hero anyone needed?

What if, in fact, the lesson of SBF is this: the last thing anyone needs is a hero.

Chapter 2

The Third Turn: CZ

There are three turning points in the story of Sam Bankman‐Fried. In each one, his project started to go in the wrong direction. This one, the last one, turned so hard and so fast there was no saving it.

SBF's empire fell apart because the crypto news site CoinDesk got a look at something that looked much like a balance sheet. Its report, by reporter Ian Allison, ran only a few hundred words, but it ended up being the most high‐impact single dispatch in all of business news in 2022. Maybe in all of news?

FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, was created based on the experience of running Alameda Research, a trading firm SBF started with others in 2017. Theoretically, FTX and Alameda were separate companies, but every indication suggests that the borders between them were much fuzzier than they should have been.

The balance sheet Allison got his hands on belonged to Alameda Research, and he presented it that way. He wrote:

The financials make concrete what industry‐watchers already suspect: Alameda is big. As of June 30, the company's assets amounted to $14.6 billion. Its single biggest asset: $3.66 billion of unlocked FTT. The third‐largest entry on the assets side of the accounting ledger? A $2.16 billion pile of FTT collateral.

By ftt he meant an exchange token that FTX had spun up in order to make using the exchange more addictive. We'll go more into how this worked later, but for now, think of it like this: ftt was like a loyalty card at a coffee shop, only this loyalty card also pays a little bit of the coffee shop's profits, above and beyond the free cup they get every sixth visit. But! The twist: Users have to buy the exchange's loyalty cards. On the other hand, that means they can have as many of them as they want, and the more customers had the more they shared in FTX's profits.

To most people, the passage quoted above from Allison's post probably reads as so much accounting gobbledygook, but one very important person read it and became alarmed. He is probably the most powerful single person in the whole cryptocurrency industry, the billionaire Changpeng Zhao (or just CZ). CZ himself had a big pile of FTX's ftt token. Binance is the biggest crypto exchange in the world, but some believed that FTX had a shot at unseating it one day.

The story hit like a howitzer shell, but when you look back at SBF's tweets over the weekend following Allison's Wednesday post, he acted as though he wasn't worried. And, in truth, it wasn't really Allison's story that brought FTX down. It was CZ's reaction. In a reversal of the biblical story, Goliath would be the one to land the critical hit.

On Sunday, November 6, CZ tweeted, As part of Binance's exit from FTX equity last year, Binance received roughly $2.1 billion USD equivalent in cash (BUSD and FTT). Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books.

Then he wrote, We will try to do so in a way that minimizes market impact.

CZ's team did not succeed in minimizing market impact.

In fact, Binance's founder kicked off a wave of contagion across the industry that will likely make the 2018 bitcoin and cryptocurrency downturn look like a boom year. It's so bad that even Binance will feel it.

The morning after CZ's promise to dump FTX's exchange token, another crypto news site, The Block, reported that withdrawals from FTX's platform seemed to have been halted. One of The Block's researchers had looked at one of FTX's addresses on the Ethereum blockchain and found out that funds just weren't moving. Meanwhile, on Twitter, customers were complaining. They wanted out.

It was Tuesday morning. Election Day in the United States. Events would start moving very quickly.

My fellow reporters at Axios heard of the stoppage and started hitting our crypto channel on Slack asking in what possible world halted withdrawals could not be very, very bad. For my part, it was hard to believe that FTX could have serious trouble. I had come to see it as a responsible actor run by a bunch of upstanding geeks.

But after three hours passed without withdrawals, the worst seemed possible.

Exchanges have complex approaches to security, but the basic idea comes down to this: cryptocurrency deposits are held in what is colloquially called wallets. Really, these are pieces of software that keep track of how much cryptocurrency a person or entity has.

They are digital lockboxes, and their keys are just data. They are very easily copied and therefore stolen if someone manages to get a look at them. It's hard to steal such keys from someone. On the other hand, if someone does get a copy of the keys, they can take someone's wealth much more quickly than a thief with the world's fastest getaway car.

So exchanges have to strike a balance between customer convenience and security. To that end, the bulk of customer funds are kept in what's called cold storage. Basically, wallets that aren't connected to the internet. This means that moving funds out of a cold wallet is more cumbersome, slower, even for the exchange’s staff.

They also store some cryptocurrency on a wallet that's actively connected to the internet to speed up withdrawals. That's called a hot wallet. Exchange staff makes a guess about how many withdrawals customers will make on a given day, and that's how much crypto an exchange will keep on a hot wallet.

When an exchange underestimates how much crypto it will need for its hot wallet, there can be a lag on withdrawals.

I thought maybe with so much demand for withdrawals that day, the 23‐year‐olds who must be running FTX security over in the Bahamas couldn't keep up as they followed security procedures to move funds from cold to hot wallets as needed.

But then it came.

Things have come full circle, SBF tweeted that Tuesday morning. "We have come to an agreement on a strategic transaction with Binance for FTX.com."

It wasn't a bottleneck. The problem was deeper.

CZ followed, "This afternoon, FTX asked for our help. There is a significant liquidity crunch. To protect users, we signed a non‐binding LOI [letter of intent], intending to fully acquire FTX.com and help cover the liquidity crunch."

Once I managed to reattach my lower jaw back inside my head, I read a Reuters report that people had attempted to draw $6 billion worth of assets in 72 hours, only to force FTX to admit that it didn't have enough crypto on hand.

More on this in Chapter 11, but this simply shouldn't happen. It was described as a bank run at the time, but … crypto exchanges aren't banks. They should have all their deposits all the time.

I wasn't the only one who had erred on the side of believing SBF when he presented himself and his exchanges as among the most responsible parties in the business. It turned out that that's what he was counting on, that we'd all keep buying this good boy image that he'd done such a good job selling.

In other words: FTX's only real insurance on customer deposits was a meme.

Sources Referenced

"Divisions in Sam Bankman‐Fried's Crypto Empire Blur on His Trading Titan Alameda's Balance Sheet," Allison, Ian, CoinDesk, Nov. 2, 2022.

SBF, @SBF_FTX, Twitter, Nov. 5, 2022: https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1588965167827935232.

CZ, @cz_binance, Twitter, Nov. 6, 2022: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1589283421704290306.

"FTX appears to have stopped processing withdrawals, on‐chain data show," Khatri, Yogita, The Block, Nov. 8, 2022.

"Crypto exchange FTX saw $6 bln in withdrawals in 72 hours," Wilson, Tom, and Angus Berwick, Reuters, Nov. 8, 2022.

"Hot wallets, non‐custodian exchanges, and smart solutions," SO&SATO Innovation Lawyers, August 27, 2019.

SBF, @SBF_FTX, Twitter, Nov. 8, 2022: https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590012124864348160.

CZ, @cz_binance, Twitter, Nov. 8, 2022: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590013613586411520.

Chapter 3

The Second Turn: Unstablecoin

When FTX melted down, the prevailing emotion was shock, but when the terra usd stablecoin (ticker symbol: UST) had fallen apart six months prior, it had been schadenfreude.

For those who didn't lose piles of money on it, the sound of terra usd crashing was the perfect music to dance to as they shook their hate of crypto and its culture right on out.

That story had a different villain, a man named Do Kwon, the Korean cofounder of Terraform Labs, the company behind terra usd and its twin coin luna (technically, terra, but no one called luna that). But it's a story that's also crucial to FTX and Alameda Research.

What we don't know is this: Were Alameda's debts to FTX already so bad before Terra that both were already doomed? Or could FTX have saved itself by letting Alameda go under with other hedge funds like it in May or June?

So here's what happened: terra usd was an algorithmic stablecoin running on its own blockchain, also called Terra. A stablecoin is a token that is designed to maintain a consistent price in the market. In almost all cases, that price is one US dollar.

Stablecoins are useful, especially for traders. For example, if a trader looks for brief jumps in a certain minor cryptocurrency (known colloquially as altcoins or shitcoins or alts), he or she can keep their cash ready in a stablecoin on an exchange. Then, when opportunity arises, buy an alt quickly and watch its price go up.

Next, when they have made enough, they can sell back into a stablecoin just as fast, maybe turning $100 into $121. If they post a screenshot of the trade on Twitter or in a Telegram channel, fans will call the trader a genius.

Plus, stablecoins make it easy to move between trading venues without passing through a bank account (which is slow and janky). They can withdraw a stablecoin onto a blockchain and move it to another exchange without ever troubling the bank's anti–money laundering team. This way a trader can use six exchanges, but their bank only ever sees one. Plus, it's just faster.

So stablecoins make life easier, at least so long as people still think in