SBF

Chapter 25CREAM Finance

It was around this time, a little over a year after FTX launched, that the company finally had its own bank accounts, according to the CFTC.

This meant customers could wire it dollars or other currencies directly, but some continued to use the old Alameda account anyway.

“Consistently from the launch of FTX and throughout the Relevant Period, Alameda accessed and used FTX customer funds for Alameda's own operations and activities, including to fund its trading, investment, and borrowing/lending activities,” the agency's complaint alleges.

SBF would later describe this practice of using an Alameda account for FTX customers' deposits as an “accounting artifact.” According to the government, that artifact would cause a multi‐billion‐dollar hole.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

I promise, pretty soon we're going to get back into the world of famous people, physical buildings, and sports teams that made FTX and SBF famous on the global stage, but we need to cover a bit more pure blockchain, in part because this next story encapsulates what's to come at the end too perfectly to skip.

Despite his Summer 2020 rescue of SushiSwap, it didn't take long for the cryptoletariat to start giving SBF side‐eye.

Yes, he had come out of that crisis as something of a hero, but no one in DeFi had ever really heard of him. He ran a centralized exchange. He'd cynically spun out a token that had no power. He seemed like a rich guy who would be happy to play them.

Crypto ...