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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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Quick Charge | hydrogen hype falls flat amid very public failures

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Quick Charge | hydrogen hype falls flat amid very public failures

On today’s hyped up hydrogen episode of Quick Charge, we look at some of the fuel’s recent failures and billion dollar bungles as the fuel cell crowd continues to lose the credibility race against a rapidly evolving battery electric market.

We’re taking a look at some of the recent hydrogen failures of 2025 – including nine-figure product cancellations in the US and Korea, a series of simultaneous bus failures in Poland, and European executives, experts, and economists calling for EU governments to ditch hydrogen and focus on the deployment of a more widespread electric trucking infrastructure.

Prefer listening to your podcasts? Audio-only versions of Quick Charge are now available on Apple PodcastsSpotifyTuneIn, and our RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.

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Drop us a line at tips@electrek.co. You can also rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or recommend us in Overcast to help more people discover the show.

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Looking for an EV lease under $200 a month? Here’s what’s available in April

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Looking for an EV lease under 0 a month? Here's what's available in April

Believe it or not, you can lease an EV for under $200 a month. New deals on models like the 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 and Kia EV6 are hard to pass up this month.

Electric vehicles have been all over the news lately, with the Trump administration threatening to end federal incentives and introducing new tariffs that are expected to lead to higher prices.

On the positive side, new EV models are arriving, giving buyers more options and driving prices down. Many automakers reported record US electric car sales in the first three months of 2024.

GM remained the number two seller of EVs behind Tesla after sales doubled in Q1 2025. With the new Equinox, Blazer, and Silverado EVs rolling out, Chevy is now the fastest-growing EV brand in the US. Ford’s Mustang Mach-E is off to its best sales start since launching, with over 11,600 models sold in the first quarter.

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With the 2025 models rolling out and about 15 new EVs arriving this year, many automakers are introducing steep discounts to move vehicles off the lot.

EVs-lease-$200-April
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 Limited (Source: Hyundai)

EVs for lease for under $200 a month in April

Although the decade-old Nissan LEAF remains one of the most affordable this April at just $149 per month, there are a few EVs under $200 right now that are worth taking a look at.

The new 2025 Hyundai IONIQ might be the best EV deal this month, with leases as low as $199. Hyundai is currently promoting a 24-month lease deal with $3,999 due at signing.

EVs-lease-$200-April
Hyundai’s new 2025 IONIQ 5 Limited with a Tesla NACS port (Source: Hyundai)

Hyundai upgraded the electric SUV with a bigger battery for more range (now up to 318 miles), a sleek new look inside and out, and it now comes with an NACS port so you can charge it at Tesla Superchargers.

The offer is for the IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range, which has a driving range of up to 245 miles. For just $229 a month, you can snag the SE RWD model, which has a range of up to 318 miles and a more powerful (225 horsepower) electric motor. It’s also a 24-month lease with $3,999 due at signing.

Hyundai-2025-IONIQ-5-interior
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 Limited interior (Source: Hyundai)

To sweeten the deal, Hyundai is offering a free ChargePoint Home Flex Level 2 EV charger with the purchase or lease of any 2024 or 2025 IONIQ 5. If you already have one, you can opt for a $400 public charging credit.

After slashing lease prices this month, the 2025 Nissan Ariya is actually cheaper than the LEAF in some regions. In Southern California, the 2025 Nissan Ariya Evolve AWD is listed at just $129 per month. The AWD model has a range of up to 272 miles.

EVs-lease-$200-April
2025 Nissan Ariya Platinum+ e-4ORCE (Source: Nissan)

The deal is for 36 months, with $4,409 due at signing. In April, Nissan cut Ariya lease prices to around $239 in most other parts of the country.

Kia has a few EVs available to lease for under $200 a month in April. The 2025 Kia Niro EV Wind is listed at just $129 for 24 months, with $3,999 due at signing. Kia’s crossover SUV has EPA-estimated range of 253 miles.

EVs-lease-$200-April
2024 Kia EV6 (Source: Kia)

The 2024 EV6 may be worth considering at just $179 for 24 months ($3,999 due at signing). In California, the EV6 Light Long Range RWD is only slightly more than the Niro Wind.

In most other parts of the country, you can still find the EV6 for under $200 a month. The Light Long Range RWD trim offers up to 310 miles of EPA-estimated range.

Lease Price Term
(months)
Amount Due at Signing Driving Range
2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range $199 24 $3,999 245 miles
2024 Kia EV6 Light Long Rang RWD $179 24 $3,999 310 miles
2024 Kia Niro EV Wind $129 24 $3,999 253 miles
2025 Nissan Ariya Evolve AWD $129 36 $4,409 272 miles
2025 Nissan LEAF S FWD $149 36 $2,629 149 miles
2024 Fiat 500 INSPI(RED) $199 24 $2,999 149 miles
EVs for lease for under $200 a month in April 2025

And don’t forget the 2024 Fiat 500e, which is now listed at just $199 for 24 months with $2,999 due at signing. The electric hatchback offers a range of up to 149 miles.

If you are looking to spend a little more, check out our list of EVs you can lease for under $300 a month.

Ready to snag the savings while they are still here? At under $200 a month, some of these EV lease deals are hard to pass up right now. Check out our links below to find deals in your area.

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The US’s first solar panels over canals pilot is now online [video]

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The US’s first solar panels over canals pilot is now online [video]

Project Nexus, the first solar panel canopies over irrigation canals in the US, is now online in California, and there are plans to expand the project to other areas.

Project Nexus is a $20 million pilot in central California’s Turlock Irrigation District launched in October 2022. The project team is exploring solar over canal design, deployment, and co-benefits using canal infrastructure and the electrical grid.

India already has solar panels over canals, but Project Nexus is the first of its kind in the US.

The Turlock Irrigation District was the first irrigation district formed in California in 1887. It provides irrigation water to 4,700 growers who farm around 150,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley.

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Project Nexus will explore whether the solar panels reduce water evaporation as a result of midday shade and wind mitigation, create improvements to water quality through reduced vegetative growth, reduce canal maintenance as a result of reduced vegetative growth, and, of course, generate renewable electricity.

The California Department of Water Resources, utility company Turlock Irrigation District, Marin County, California-based water and energy project developer Solar AquaGrid, and The University of California, Merced, are partnering on the pilot. Project Nexus originated from a 2021 research project led by UC Merced alumna and project scientist Brandi McKuin.

Solar panels were installed at two sites over both wide- and narrow-span sections of Turlock Irrigation District canals in Stanislaus County, in various orientations. The sections range from 20 feet wide to 100 feet wide. University of California, Merced has positioned research equipment at both sites to collect baseline data so the researchers can decide where solar will work and where it won’t.

In February 2023, Project Nexus announced it would also deploy long-term iron flow battery storage in the form of two ESS 75kW turnkey “Energy Warehouse” batteries.

You can learn more about Project Nexus here:

Read more: In a US first, California will pilot solar-panel canopies over canals


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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisers to help you every step of the way. Get started here. –trusted affiliate link*

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