Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and chief executive officer of FTX, in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, May 11, 2021.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Sam Bankman-Fried became a crypto billionaire and one of the most famous players in the industry by building cryptocurrency exchange FTX into a top site used by traders and investors.
His company was valued at $32 billion in January and currently has more than a million users averaging a total of nearly $10 billion in daily trading volume. But it’s still privately held, so the public doesn’t know how badly it’s been harmed by the “crypto winter” of the last few months. As a point of reference, Coinbase, which is public, has lost roughly two-thirds of its value this year, and mining company Marathon Digital is down by more than half.
While Bankman-Fried, who lives in the Bahamas, has the financial benefit of opacity, his exposure to the…
