Young U.S. Billionaire Rescues Fumbling Crypto Startups

Sam Bankman-Fried does not look like the most powerful man in crypto. Friendly and rumpled, with an unruly halo of curly hair, the 30-year-old widely known as SBF has an affinity for League of Legends, fidget spinners, and other trappings of nerd culture, Jeff John Roberts wrote recently for Fortune.

Photo Insert: Already a multibillionaire entrepreneur (his fortune is valued at $11.5 billion or so), Sam Bankman-Fried has a new identity: Crypto’s white knight.

But underneath the goofy facade is a trading wunderkind whose ambition knows no limits. An MIT physics grad, Fried honed his trading skills at renowned quant shop Jane Street Capital before launching a successful firm of his own, Alameda Research.

In 2019 he founded crypto exchange FTX, hailed by some as the best derivatives platform ever built.

Already a multibillionaire entrepreneur (his fortune is valued at $11.5 billion or so), Fried has a new identity: Crypto’s white knight, swooping in to save some of the startups struggling amid the “crypto winter” in which Bitcoin and other assets have crash-landed.

Fried will have to be busy as cryptoworld has been badly bruised, with critics calling the virtual currency exchanges phony while central banks have said those coins have no inherent value.

The billionaire will have to use his billions to salvage the industry, which has been used by criminals and terrorists to finance their bloody operations and stash their loot in safer havens.

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