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Samuel Bankman-Fried’s poster in downtown San Francisco.

MacKenzie Sigalos | CNBC

The Kimchi Swap put Sam Bankman-Fried on the map.

The year was 2017, and the ex-Jane Street Capital quant trader noticed something funny when he looked at the page on CoinMarketCap.com listing the price of bitcoin on exchanges around the world. Today, that price is pretty much uniform across the exchanges, but back then, Bankman-Fried previously told CNBC that he would sometimes see a 60% difference in the value of the coin. His immediate instinct, he says, was to get in on the arbitrage trade — buying bitcoin on one exchange, selling it back on another exchange, and then earning a profit equivalent to the price spread.

“That’s the lowest hanging fruit,” Bankman-Fried said in September.

The arbitrage opportunity was especially compelling in South Korea, where the exchange-listed price of bitcoin was significantly more than in other countries. It was dubbed the Kimchi Premium – a reference to the traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented cabbage.

FTX's Sam Bankman Fried to NYT: I would have been more thorough if I had concentrated better

After a month of personally dabbling in the market, Bankman-Fried launched his own trading house, Alameda Research (named after his hometown of Alameda, California, near San Francisco), to scale the opportunity and work on it full-time. Bankman-Fried said in an interview in September that the firm sometimes made as much as a million dollars a day.

Part of why SBF, as he’s also called, earned street cred for carrying out a relatively straightforward trading strategy had to do with the fact that it wasn’t the easiest thing to execute on crypto rails five years ago. Bitcoin arbitrage involved setting up connections to each one of the trading platforms, as well as building out other complicated infrastructure to abstract away a lot of the operational aspects of making the trade. Bankman-Fried’s Alameda became very good at that and the money rolled in.

From there, the SBF empire ballooned.

Alameda’s success spurred the launch of crypto exchange FTX in the spring of 2019. FTX’s success begat a $2 billion venture fund that seeded other crypto firms. Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth grew to over $16 billion at its peak in March.

Bankman-Fried was suddenly the poster boy for crypto everywhere, and the FTX logo adorned everything from Formula 1 race cars to a Miami basketball arena. The 30-year-old went on an endless press tour, bragged about having a balance sheet that could one day buy Goldman Sachs, and became a fixture in Washington, where he was one of the Democratic party’s top donors, promising to sink $1 billion into U.S. political races (before later backtracking).

It was all a mirage.

As crypto prices tanked this year, Bankman-Fried bragged that he and his enterprise were immune. But in fact, the sector-wide wipeout hit his operation quite hard. Alameda borrowed money to invest in failing digital asset firms this spring and summer to keep the industry afloat, then reportedly siphoned off FTX customers’ deposits to stave off margin calls and meet immediate debt obligations. A Twitter fight with the CEO of rival exchange Binance pulled the mask off the scheme.

Alameda, FTX and a host of subsidiaries Bankman-Fried founded have filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware. He’s stepped down from his leadership roles and lost 94% of his personal wealth in a single day. It is unclear exactly where he is now, as his $40 million Bahamas penthouse is reportedly up for sale. The photos of his face plastered across FTX advertisements throughout downtown San Francisco serve as an unwelcome reminder of his rotting empire.

It was a steep fall from hero to villain. But there were a lot of signs.

Bankman-Fried told CNBC in September that one of his fundamental principles when it comes to playing the markets is working with incomplete information.

“When you can sort of start to quantify and map out what’s going on, but you know there are a lot of things you don’t know,” he said. “You know you’re being approximate, but you have to try to figure out what trade to do anyway.”

The following account is based on reporting from CNBC, Bloomberg, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Piecing together bits and pieces from various news sources paints a picture of an investor who over-extended himself, frantically moved to cover his mistakes with questionable and perhaps illegal tactics, and surrounded himself with a tight cabal of advisors who could not or would not curb his worst impulses.

What went wrong in the last year

The risk of an FTX crypto contagion

The big problem was that everyone was borrowing from one another, which only works when the price of all those crypto coins keeps going up. By June, bitcoin and ether had both tumbled by more than half for the year.

“Leverage is the source of every implosion in financial institutions, both traditional and crypto,” said Hart Lambur, a former Goldman Sachs government bond trader who provided liquidity in U.S. Treasuries for central banks, money managers and hedge funds.

Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Long-Term Capital, Three Arrows Capital and now FTX all blew up due to bad leverage that got sniffed out and exploited by the market,” continued Lambur, who now works in decentralized finance.

As the dominoes fell, SBF jumped into the mix in June to try to bail out some of the failing crypto firms before it was too late, extending hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. In some cases, he made moves to try to buy these companies at fire-sale prices.

Amid the wave of bankruptcies, some of Alameda’s lenders asked for their money back. But Alameda didn’t have it, because it was no longer liquid. Bankman-Fried’s trading firm had parked the borrowed money in venture investments, a decision he told the Times was “probably not really worth it.”

To meet its debt obligations, FTX borrowed from customer deposits in FTX to quietly bail out Alameda, the Journal and the Times reported. The borrowing was in the billions. Bankman-Fried admitted the move in his interview with the Times, saying that Alameda had a large “margin position” on FTX, but he declined to disclose the exact amount.

“It was substantially larger than I had thought it was,” Bankman-Fried told the Times. “And in fact the downside risk was very significant.”

Reuters and the Journal both reported that the lifeline was around $10 billion, and Reuters reports that $1 billion to $2 billion of that emergency financing is now missing. Tapping customer funds without permission was a violation of FTX’s own terms and conditions. On Wall Street, it would be a clear violation of U.S. securities laws.

The two firms – one of the world’s biggest crypto brokers and one of the world’s biggest crypto buyers – were supposed to be separated by a firewall. But they were, in fact, quite cozy, at one point extending to a romantic relationship between Bankman-Fried and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, he acknowledged to the Times.

“FTX and Alameda had an extremely problematic relationship,” Castle Island Venture’s Nic Carter told CNBC. “Bankman-Fried operated both an exchange and a prop shop, which is super unorthodox and just not really allowed in actually regulated capital markets.”

The borrowing and lending scheme between the two firms was more convoluted than just using customer funds to make up for bad trading bets. FTX tried to paper over the hole by denoting assets in two crypto tokens that were essentially made up – FTT, a token created by FTX, and Serum, which was a token created and promoted by FTX and Alameda, according to financial filings reported by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine.

Firms make up crypto tokens all the time – indeed, it’s a big part of how the crypto boom of the last two years was financed – and they usually offer some sort of benefit to users, although their real value to most traders is simple speculation, that is, the hope that the price will rise. Owners of FTT were promised lower trading costs on FTX and the ability to earn interest and rewards like waived blockchain fees. While investors can profit when FTT and other coins increase in value, they’re largely unregulated and are particularly susceptible to market downturns.

These tokens were essentially proxies for what people believed Bankman-Fried’s exchange to be worth, since it controlled the vast majority of them. Investor confidence in FTX was reflected in the price of FTT.

The key point here is that FTX was reportedly siphoning off customer assets as collateral for loans, and then covering it with a token it made up and printed at will, drip-feeding only a fraction of its supply into the open market. The financial acrobatics between the two firms somewhat resembles the moves that sunk energy firm Enron almost two decades ago – in that case, Enron essentially hid losses by transferring underperforming assets to off-balance sheet subsidiaries, then created complicated financial instruments to obscure the moves.

As all this was happening, Bankman-Fried continued his press tour, lionized as one of the great young tech entrepreneurs of the age. It only began to unravel once Bankman-Fried got into a public spat with Binance, a rival exchange.

Binance, Crypto.com CEOs race to reassure customers funds are safe

What went wrong in the last two weeks

The relationship between Binance and Bankman-Fried goes back almost to the beginning of his time in the industry. In 2019, Binance announced a strategic investment in FTX and said that as part of the deal it had taken “a long-term position in the FTX Token (FTT) to help enable sustainable growth of the FTX ecosystem.”

Flash forward a couple years to the summer of 2022. Bankman-Fried was pressing regulators to look into Binance and criticizing the exchange in public. It’s unclear exactly why – it could have been based on legitimate suspicions. Or it may simply have been because Binance was a major competitor to FTX, both as an exchange and as a potential buyer of other distressed crypto companies.

Whatever the reason, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, soon saw his chance to strike.

On Nov. 2, CoinDesk reported a leaked balance sheet showing that a significant amount of Alameda’s assets were held in FTX’s illiquid FTT token. It raised questions both about the trading firm’s solvency, as well as FTX’s financials.

Zhao took to Twitter on Sunday, Nov. 6, saying that Binance had about $2.1 billion worth of FTT and BUSD, its own stablecoin.

Then he dropped the bomb:

“Due to recent revelations that have came to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books,” he said.

Investors raced to pull money out of FTX. On Nov. 6, according to Bankman-Fried, the exchange had roughly $5 billion of withdrawals, “the largest by a huge margin.” On an average day, net inflows had been in the tens of millions of dollars.

The speed of the withdrawals underscores how the largely unregulated crypto market is often operating in an information vacuum, meaning that traders react fast when new facts come to light.

“Crypto players are reacting quicker to news and rumor, which in turn builds up a liquidity crisis much faster than one would have seen in traditional finance,” said Fabian Astic, head of decentralized finance and digital assets for Moody’s Investors Service. 

“The opacity of the market operations often leads to panic reactions that, in turn, spark a liquidity crunch. The developments with Celsius, Three Arrows, Voyager, and FTX show how easy it is for crypto investors to lose confidence, prompting them to withdraw large sums and causing a near-death crisis for these firms,” continued Astic.

As the FTT token plunged in value in tandem with the mass withdrawals, SBF quietly sought investors to cover the multibillion-dollar hole from the money that had been withdrawn by Alameda. That value may have been as high as $10 billion, according to multiple reports. They all declined, and in a move of desperation, SBF turned to CZ.

In a public tweet on Nov. 8, CZ said Binance agreed to buy the company, though the deal had a key term: non-binding. The sudden public revelation that FTX was in need of a bailout caused FTT’s value to plunge off a cliff.

The next day, CZ claimed he did due diligence and didn’t like what he saw, essentially sealing FTX’s demise. Bankman-Fried speculated to the Times that CZ never intended to buy it in the first place.

On Friday, Nov. 11, FTX and Alameda both filed for bankruptcy. FTX, which was valued at $32 billion in a financing round earlier this year, has frozen trading and customer assets and is seeking to discharge its creditors in bankruptcy court. Bankman-Fried is no longer the boss at either firm.

A new bankruptcy filing posted on Tuesday shows that FTX may have more than one million creditors. It plans to file a list of the 50 largest ones this week.

Lawyers for the exchange wrote that FTX has been in contact with “dozens” of regulators in the U.S. and overseas in the last 72 hours, including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The SEC and Department of Justice are reportedly investigating FTX for civil and criminal violations of securities laws. Financial regulators in the Bahamas are also reportedly looking at the possibility of criminal misconduct.

CEO of FTX Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill December 8, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Alex Wong | Getty Images

Binance is now poised to claim absolute dominance over the industry.

“Binance clearly comes out stronger from all of this,” said William Quigley, co-founder of the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin tether. “CZ claims Binance has no debt, and doesn’t use its BNB token as collateral. Both of those are good practices in the highly volatile crypto markets.”

Quigley added that more institutional trading and custody will likely shift to Binance.

“The cryptocurrency industry’s entire ethos is founded on disintermediation and decentralization, so Binance’s ever-growing dominance raises reasonable fears over how further centralization will affect the average trader,” said Clara Medalie, director of research at data firm Kaiko.

“FTX’s collapse benefits no one, not even Binance, which will now face growing questions over its monopoly of market activity,” Medalie told CNBC, speculating that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg of market participants affected by the fall of FTX and Alameda.

“Each entity has numerous twisted and over-lapping financial ties to projects throughout the industry that now stand to lose support or go under themselves,” she said.

In the meantime, though, Binance took a bath on the collapse of the FTT token, which CZ says the firm held after Bankman-Fried asked for a bailout.

“Full disclosure,” CZ tweeted last Sunday.

“Binance never shorted FTT. We still have a bag of as we stopped selling FTT after SBF called me. Very expensive call.”

– CNBC’s Ari Levy, Kate Rooney and Ryan Browne contributed to this report.

Sam Bankman-Fried faces possible bankruptcy after failed FTX deal

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Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump

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Global energy giant RWE halts US offshore wind because of Trump

Global renewable developer and energy giant RWE has halted its US offshore wind operations “for the time being” because of the “political environment” the Trump administration has created.

RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer, said in March that it had dialed back its US offshore wind activities. But now, CEO Marcus Krebber said in a speech transcript, which he’ll deliver at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Essen on April 30, that its US offshore wind business is now closed (but it wasn’t all bad news): 

In the US, where we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being, our business in onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically. At the start of this year, we reached an important milestone when our US generation capacity hit the 10 gigawatt mark. The construction of a further 4 gigawatts is secured.

He went on to say that renewables have created regional value and jobs, but that the company remains “cautious given the political developments.” RWE has introduced more stringent requirements for future US investments:

All necessary federal permits must be in place. Tax credits must be safe harbored and all relevant tariff risks mitigated. In addition, onshore wind and solar projects must have secured offtake at the time of the investment decision. Only if these conditions are met will further investments be possible, given the political environment.

About half of RWE’s installed renewable capacity is in the US, where it’s the third-largest renewable energy company through its subsidiary, RWE Clean Energy. RWE holds the rights to develop US offshore wind projects in New York, Louisiana, and California.

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RWE paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease area in 2022, where it’s meant to develop the 3 gigawatt (GW) Community Offshore Wind with the UK’s National Grid. Community Offshore Wind was projected to come online in the early 2030s and expected to power more than a million homes.

The developer paid $5.6 billion for the Louisiana lease in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023 as the lone bidder for development rights, and the Canopy Offshore Wind project off Northern California was not expected to be completed for another decade.

Read more: Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build


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Trump’s memecoin dinner contest earns insiders $900,000 in two days

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Trump's memecoin dinner contest earns insiders 0,000 in two days

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his allies have raked in nearly $900,000 in trading fees over the past two days from the president’s $TRUMP cryptocurrency token, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain data company. 

The surge came after a Wednesday announcement in which the top 220 holders of the token were promised dinner with the president.

“Have Dinner in Washington, D.C. With President Trump,” reads a message on the front page of the Trump coin’s website. The event, which is black tie optional and hosted at the president’s private club in the Washington area, is scheduled for May 22, with a reception for the top 25 holders. A “VIP White House Tour” will take place the following day, the site says. The website also hosts an active leaderboard displaying the usernames of top buyers.

The $TRUMP memecoin jumped more than 50% on the dinner news, boosting its total market value to $2.7 billion. It was met with fierce criticism from some of Trump’s political opponents who said the move was further evidence that the president was using crypto to enrich himself. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a prominent Trump critic, wrote on X that the sale was “the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Roughly 80% of the $TRUMP token supply is controlled by the Trump Organization and affiliates, according to the project’s website. Since its launch in January, trading activity has generated about $324.5 million in trading fees for insiders, Chainalysis found. These fees are generated through the token’s built-in mechanism that routes a percentage of each trade to wallets controlled by the project — wallets that, according to the website, are linked to the coin’s creators.

Memecoins, often referred to as meme tokens, are a subset of digital assets that use blockchain technology and derive their value largely from internet culture, memes and social media hype rather than from an underlying utility or asset. The originators of memecoins can make fees when their coins are bought and sold.

They have grown in popularity in recent years as speculative assets, with some coins including dogecoin and fartcoin amassing total market values in excess of $1 billion.

Most of the $TRUMP supply remains locked under a three-year vesting plan, with coins gradually becoming available over time. Lockups like these are meant to protect investors by preventing insiders from cashing out all at once — a scheme commonly known in the crypto world as a “rug pull.” Vesting schedules aim to give retail buyers confidence that early holders won’t overwhelm the market and tank the token’s value.

Still, the dinner contest is being viewed by critics as an unusually explicit attempt to monetize presidential access. 

As CNBC reported Friday, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are urging the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether the promotion constitutes “pay to play” corruption.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The company behind the memecoin also did not respond to a request for comment.

Delaney Marsco, the director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance and government accountability, told NBC News the coin and dinner contest amounted to an unprecedented ethics breach — though it is unlikely to be illegal.

“Criminal conflicts of interest statutes don’t apply to the President,” she said. “That has allowed him to go against decades of of norms that every modern president since Carter has adhered to, which is to divest your financial interests, rid yourself of your businesses, and kind of go in to the presidency with a clean financial slate so that no one could accuse you of manipulating policy decisions or using your position in order to enrich yourself.” 

“The fact that he is not barred by the law from having these financial interests like this meme coin allows him to engage in a lot of seemingly corrupt activity. It has the appearance of a pay to play, so the President is apparently selling access to himself,” Marsco added.

Molly White, an independent crypto researcher, told NBC News that the leaderboard only shows top $TRUMP holders — and then only by their chosen screen name, making it difficult to identify who is paying to potentially join the dinner.

Schiff and Warren have cited public reports showing that some $TRUMP investors have ties to foreign exchanges or received funds from crypto platforms banned in the U.S., including Binance.

White also noted that at least one top $TRUMP owner has an account on Binance, a cryptocurrency company that doesn’t allow American users.

Trump was elected with significant help from the cryptocurrency industry, which poured tens of millions of dollars into the 2024 election, outpacing corporate donations from traditional sectors like banking and oil. After opposing digital assets during his first term, Trump pivoted in 2024 to campaign as a champion of cryptocurrency, casting Democrats as hostile to innovation and as advocating for tighter regulation. 

The $TRUMP token itself offers no product or service, according to the project’s website. It is part of a broader push by the Trump family into digital assets, despite the market’s volatility and regulatory risks.

In addition to the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, the family is backing World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance venture that has raised $550 million across two token sales since last October. Buyers are barred from reselling their tokens and receive no share of profits — but a Trump-affiliated entity is entitled to 75% of net revenue, including token sale proceeds.

Together, these projects have created new streams of revenue for Trump and his inner circle at a time when regulatory oversight of cryptocurrency has weakened sharply under his administration.

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Drive Electric Earth Month, continues this weekend, get your EV Qs answered

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Drive Electric Earth Month, continues this weekend, get your EV Qs answered

It’s that time of year again, time for events across the country to show off electric vehicles at Drive Electric Earth Month.

Drive Electric Earth Month is an offshoot of Drive Electric Week, a long-running annual tradition hosting meetups mostly in the US, but also occasionally in other countries. It started as Drive Electric Earth Day, but since not every event can happen on the same day, they went ahead and extended it to encompass “Earth Month” events that happen across the month of April. It’s all organized by Plug In America, the Sierra Club, the Electric Vehicle Association, EV Hybrid Noire, and Drive Electric USA.

Events consist of general Earth Day-style community celebrations, EV Ride & Drives where you can test drive several EVs in one place, and opportunities to talk to EV owners and ask them questions about what it’s like to live with an EV, away from the pressure of a dealership.

This month, there are 158 events registered across the US and 1 in Mexico (including one online webinar about things to consider when purchasing an EV).

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Events have been happening all month, but the biggest weekend is this upcoming one, APril 26-27.

One really neat event was the Asheville event, which showcased the resiliency of EVs in an area devastated by Hurricane Helene, which was made more severe by climate change. That event was attended by the Rivian R1T which famously got dragged 100 feet submerged in mud and came out running fine.

But the bulk of the events happened on the weekends surrounding Earth Day, April 22, so there were several last weekend and will be even more this upcoming weekend.

There are plenty of events in the big cities where you’d expect, but Plug In America wanted to highlight a few of the events in smaller places around the country. Here’s a sampling of upcoming events:

  • Big Island EV – Cruise and Picnic in Waimea, HI on April 26, 10am-1pm – EV drivers will congregate in various places around the Big Island (Kona, Waimea, Waikoloa and Hilo), then drive up Saddle Road to the Gil Kahele Recreation Area on Mauna Kea for a potluck and a chance to talk about the experience of owning EVs on the Big Island.
  • Santa Barbara Earth Day 2025 and Green Car Show in Santa Barbara, CA on April 26-27, 11am-8pm – This is part of Santa Barbara’s Earth Day celebration, which routinely attracts 30,000 participants and is one of the longest-running Earth Day celebrations on the planet. The Green Car Show includes ride & drives and an “Owners Corner” where owners can showcase their EVs and attendees can check them out and ask questions.
  • Earth Day’25 – EV’s role in a sustainable future in Queretaro City, Mexico on April 26, 9am-4pm – The sole Mexican event, this is a combined in-person/online seminar at the Querétaro Institute of Technology.
  • Norman Earth Day Festival in Norman, OK on April 27, 12-5pm – Another municipal Earth Day festival, with hands-on activities for kids to learn about the environment. A portion of the parking lot reserved for an EV car show for EV owners who pre-register to show off their vehicles.
  • Oregon Electric Vehicle Association Test Drive & Information Expo in Portland, OR on April 27, 10am-4pm – This one is at Daimler Truck’s North American HQ, and will have several EVs for test drives, owner displays (including DIY gas-to-EV conversions), and keynote presentations by EV experts. They’ll even have a 1914 Detroit Electric EV available for test rides!
  • And, we at Electrek want to give a shoutout to Rove’s EV Drive Days in Santa Ana 10am-3pm April 28 – ROVE is the company behind the “full-service” EV charging concept that we’ve talked about several times here on Electrek, and we like what they’re doing for EV charging. They’ve hosted a few community events, and this is their contribution to Earth Month.

Each event has a different assortment of activities (e.g. test drives won’t be available at every event, generally just the larger ones attended by local dealerships), so be sure to check the events page to see what the plan is for your local event.

These events have offered a great way to connect with owners and see the newest electric vehicle tech, and even get a chance to do test rides and drives in person. Attendees got to hear unfiltered information from actual owners about the benefits and trials of owning EVs, allowing for longer and more genuine (and often more knowledgeable) conversations than one might normally encounter at a dealership.

And if you’re an owner – you can show off your car and answer those questions for interested onlookers.

To view all the events and see what’s happening in your area, you can check out the list of events or the events map. You can also sign up to volunteer at your local events, and if you plan to show off your electric car, you can RSVP on each event page and list the vehicle that you plan to show (or see what other vehicles have already registered).


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