How much time do you have to make 100 million? Many people would say that they can’t make 100 million even if they spend their whole life. However, there is a person who made a huge fortune of nearly 20 billion US dollars through currency trading in the cryptocurrency circle in just three years and became a legend.

The boy who created the miracle is called Sam Bankman Freed. He has curly hair and looks ordinary, but he is the founder of the cryptocurrency circle born in the 1990s. In November, it was revealed that his assets began to shrink, and he lost nearly 100 billion a day! That's not all, he was taken away by the police recently. What is going on? Let's take a look together.

1. The cryptocurrency prodigy made 20 billion in 3 years

Bankman is an American boy born in 1992. He has always been seen in plain grey short-sleeved shirts and messy curly hair, looking very ordinary. He usually stays at home playing computer games when he has nothing to do, just like a geek.

However, such an ordinary person has a great dream of making money, which is to make 20 billion US dollars before the age of 30. Bankman's dream seems to be a pipe dream to others, but he is full of confidence.

A large part of his confidence comes from his family of origin. Both his parents are professors at Stanford University and are famous economists. He has also inherited his parents' excellent genes and is very sensitive to numbers.

He finally relied on his own efforts to successfully enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduation, Bankman successfully entered Wall Street and had an annual salary of up to one million. However, Bankman did not take this job seriously, he found a way to make more money.

This trick is to use cryptocurrencies to arbitrage on exchanges, selling cryptocurrencies from low-priced exchanges to higher-priced exchanges, thereby earning huge price differences. Bankman quit his stable job and officially established a trading company called Alameda Research.

The company specialized in cryptocurrency arbitrage and made millions of dollars in just one day. Bankman's reputation gradually spread in the industry, and he was even called the "cryptocurrency prodigy."

After that, Bankman was not satisfied with the simple arbitrage business and began to officially enter the cryptocurrency exchange. In 2019, Bankman established the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and issued the cryptocurrency FTT.

In order to attract more customers to his exchange, Bankman began to invite NBA stars to endorse his products, sponsored e-sports teams, and carried out a large-scale marketing campaign, successfully attracting many young customer groups and bigwigs in the investment community to join.

Soon after, Bankman's FTX exchange became one of the top three exchanges in the world, with a market value of $32 billion. Bankman had already achieved his goal of saving $20 billion before the age of 30.

2. Was Bankman’s arrest a scam?

However, the cryptocurrency industry has not been doing well in recent years, and the storm soon came. On November 2, a media outlet directly broke the news that Bankman’s company had falsified its accounts, and most of its assets were actually FTT currencies discovered by his own exchange.

In other words, the company's assets were fake, and the money on the books was transferred from one hand to the other. Bankman used the inflated currency value on the books to siphon off users' cash pools. He kept painting big rosy pictures for users and tricked more people into investing.

After the news was exposed, many people realized that they had been cheated and began to sell their FTT. The market value of FTT continued to fall, and Bankman's assets lost up to 100 billion US dollars every day. Faced with this situation, Bankman, who had been quibbling at first, had to admit that it was indeed FTT that misappropriated the customer service transaction funds.

In order to give an explanation to users, Bankman announced his resignation as president. Until November 30, when Bankman attended the New York Times summit, he still defended himself, saying that he had never intended to deceive anyone.

On November 12, Bankman was formally arrested by the police on suspicion of eight criminal offenses including securities fraud and money laundering. These crimes are likely to result in Bankman facing up to 115 years in prison.

3. There are many victims, and the US political world is implicated

After Bankman was arrested, the turmoil he stirred up did not stop. Many people were on Bankman's victim list, including Sequoia Capital, Japan's SoftBank, and other major investment companies. Nearly 500,000 retail investors in Taiwan were deceived by Bankman, and all their wealth was on it.

In addition, the case also implicated the American political community and caused turmoil. Bankman was suspected of defrauding the US government and making illegal political donations. Bankman even spent tens of millions of dollars to make illegal donations in the elections of the two major political parties in the United States to influence the US political situation.

4. Summary:

Bankman, the once-powerful "coin prodigy", created a myth of earning $20 billion in three years. Now that the truth has been revealed, it turns out that everything was just a scam manipulated by him maliciously. His company was forced to go bankrupt and became a rat that everyone wanted to kill. It is really sad.

Do you have anything else to say about Bankman? Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below.