Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

Sam was less surprised that Binance was wash trading than by how badly they were doing it. “They were doing a B-minus job at market manipulation,” he said. One Binance bot would make a wide market in Bitcoin futures, and another Binance bot would enter and lift its high offer. If, to keep the numbers simple, the fair value of bitcoin was $100, the

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The Binance futures launch was a case in point. It had taken the Binance internal team three months longer to create their crypto futures trading platform than it had taken Gary, working by himself, to create FTX’s.…

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Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Sam treated everything on his schedule as optional. The schedule was less a plan than a theory. When people asked Sam for his time, they assumed they’d posed a yes or no question, and the noises Sam made always sounded more like “yes” than like “no.” They didn’t know that inside Sam’s mind was a dial, with zero on one end and one hundred on the oth

In the first eighteen months of FTX’s existence, there had been several other dustups with Binance of this sort. CZ developed what three of his employees at the time described as an obsession with his new rival. He’d ask staff for regular reports about FTX, and speak of FTX in ways he would not of the other exchanges.

“I was viewed as smart, as a nerd, not as a good guy or a bad guy,” said Sam. “Not really viewed as a person. Smart and inoffensive and maybe not all that human.” Worse, he didn’t totally disagree with his classmates’ assessment. “I didn’t feel misunderstood. I felt like their half-assed guesses were in the right ballpark.”

The business hadn’t even really been Sam’s idea but Tara’s. Tara had been running the Centre for Effective Altruism, in Berkeley, and Sam, while at Jane Street, had become one of her biggest donors. Through the spring and summer of 2017, the two of them were on the phone constantly. At some point Sam revealed his romantic interest in her; at some o