The spectacular fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried was the most . The floppy-haired 30-year-old former billionaire, who goes by , is the founder of , then the industry’s third-largest exchange. When crypto prices collapsed earlier this year he swooped in with loans for Voyager and BlockFi, handing the lending ventures hundreds of millions of dollars, and snapped up assets from Three Arrows, a crypto hedge fund. Many saw a new John Pierpont Morgan, the banker who saved the American financial system in 1907. Mr Bankman-Fried also spent millions of dollars from his vast fortune, worth $26bn at its peak, supporting political campaigns on . He planned to give away much of the rest, having endorsed effective altruism, a movement that espouses charitable giving to safeguard humanity’s future. Politically engaged, seemingly altruistic, decidedly not a : many thought was the man who could save the industry from itself, a reputation he hardly discouraged.