Meet Sam Bankman-Fried, the richest crypto trader and the world’s youngest billionaire

Sam Bankman-Fried is the richest crypto trader and investor who is worth close to $26.5B according to Forbes. A big thanks to his FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm.

More so, Sam Bankman-Fried was born March 6, 1992, and he is currently the founder and CEO of FTX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange. He also manages assets through Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm he founded in October 2017.

Early Life and Business

Bankman-Fried is the son of law professors from Stanford Law School, Barbara Fried, and Joseph Bankman. When he was about 14 years old, his mother noticed that he had spontaneously developed an interest in utilitarianism.

He graduated from a private high school in the California Bay Area, and in 2014 he completed a Bachelor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There, he lived in a coeducational group house called Epsilon Theta. In 2012, he blogged about utilitarianism, baseball, and politics. In 2014, he graduated

However, Bankman-Fried started his career at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm, trading international ETFs. In October 2017, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm, and FTX, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange in April 2019.

After attending a late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, and while also inspired by the concurrent fork of Bitcoin Cash, he moved to Hong Kong.

 (As of 2021, FTX owns approximately 90% of Alameda Research In January 2018, he organized an arbitrage trade, moving up to $25M per day, to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan compared to in America. After attending a late 2018 cryptocurrency conference in Macau, and while also inspired by the concurrent fork of Bitcoin Cash, he moved to Hong Kong.

Bankman-Fried was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 (Finance) list in 2021.

Philanthropy

Most of his wealth, he said he will eventually donate to charity based on a philosophy called “earning to give,” which is tied up in the ownership of about half of FTX and a share of its FTT tokens.

Sam Bankman-Fried is a member of ‘Giving What We Can’ and plans to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life.

Furthermore, his company FTX has a policy of donating 1% of its revenue to charity. He was one of the largest CEO donors to Joe Biden in the 2020 election cycle, personally donating $5.2 million.

How did Sam Bankman-Fried make his fortune?

Bankman-Fried is the youngest billionaire in the world. He has been described as ‘the new Mark Zuckerberg’ .

During college, Sam spent more time playing video games than studying and was more interested in morals and ethics than science. “It would have been great if I was more hippie and less scientific,” he once confessed.

7) I'm (in)famous for playing League of Legends while on phone calls.

I'll also try to avoid restarting my RAM if possible.

One side advantage of the bean bags: if I sleep in the office, my mind stays in work mode, and I don't have to reload everything the next day. pic.twitter.com/AKlQm7wneI

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) February 4, 2021

Bankman-Fried is vegan and has a strong altruistic approach inspired by figures like Princeton philosopher Peter Singer and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

After graduating from MIT, Sam Bankman-Fried landed a job at the finance firm Jane Street Capital on a six-figure salary, part of which he donated to philanthropic causes.

The now CEO of FTX set his sights on cryptocurrencies in 2017, when Bitcoin had its first big rise, going from $ 2,500 to almost $ 20,000 per token in just six months. Sam saw an opportunity to buy Bitcoin in the United States and sell it in Japan for up to 30% more.

At the end of that year, the young man quit his job, took a million dollars that he had saved, and got another million with loans from friends and family. With that investment, he founded Alameda Research, a quantitative trading company, dedicated to creating strategies based on mathematical calculations to identify business opportunities.

How he founded FTX, his Cryptocurrency Exchange 

In 2019, he took a share of Alameda Research’s profits and raised $ 8 million with some venture capital firms to found FTX, his own cryptocurrency exchange.

In its early days, FTX operated out of a WeWork in Hong Kong with just a dozen employees. The new exchange grew so fast, it soon reached a valuation of $ 18 million and sold a portion to Binance for around $ 70 million. However, in July 2021 he repurchased Binance’s 15% stake in FTX for $ 2.3 billion.

Last September, Sam moved his headquarters to the Bahamas, and since the company’s overhead costs are very low, its profit margins are high – close to 50%.

In the past year, FTX had nearly risk-free revenue of $750 million and a profit of $350 million. At the same time, Alameda Research made a profit of $ 1 billion in 2020.

Despite its altruistic intentions, Bankman-Fried has only donated $25 million to causes such as voter registration, global poverty alleviation, and artificial intelligence security. Such a figure represents only 0.1% of his fortune, leaving him as the least charitable member of the Forbes 400 index.

RECOMMENDED ARTICLEs

9 Best Cryptocurrencies You Should Invest In Today

Everything You Need To Know Before Investing in Bitcoin

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the real creator of Bitcoin?

What is Wakanda Inu, the first African meme coin making wave

What is Wakanda Inu, the first African meme coin making wave