Sam Bankman-Fried, chief executive of digital asset exchange FTX, said his efforts to bail out companies during the crypto market downturn have had “mixed” results.
The 30-year-old billionaire engineered deals worth about $1 billion to backstop struggling companies after the prices of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin declined sharply in the spring and summer. Not all of these bailouts had a happy ending, Bankman-Fried said in an interview on Bloomberg’s “David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations.”
“I think some were going to turn out to be profitable, some won't be,” Bankman-Fried said. “We had to make snap judgment calls.”
He pointed to a deal struck in June with troubled crypto lender Voyager Digital Ltd. as one that went badly. Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm that Bankman-Fried founded, offered a $485 million loan to Voyager, but it wasn’t enough to keep the company from filing for bankruptcy in July.
Bankman-Fried said he had higher hopes for other deals he was involved with, including one with BlockFi Inc. FTX US, the American affiliate of FTX, agreed to provide a $400 million revolving credit facility to BlockFi and gained the option to buy the crypto lending platform outright.
BlockFi had “just sort of burned through their runway, had a functional business with a strong team and just needed more cash to be able to operate effectively going forward,” Bankman-Fried said.
He said his backstopping, which earned him comparisons to John Pierpont Morgan in the 1907 banking crisis, was fueled in part by FTX’s profitability and fundraising, and had the ultimate goal of supporting companies in the industry, rather than only “maximizing on deals.”
In the interview, Bankman-Fried said he often goes to Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of the crypto industry. There are still big questions about whether the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will claim authority over the crypto space. Bankman-Fried said he’d be fine with either regulator taking charge.
“What we've tried really hard to do over the last year is get the industry to a place where it is happy to accept sensible regulation,” he said, noting that he believes tensions have cooled somewhat between regulators and the digital currency companies.
As for the crypto winter, even as the price of Bitcoin has slipped below $20,000, he noted that things could have been worse. He said he isn’t “super worried” about the industry imploding anytime soon.