Crypto's Reckoning

One of the questions to emerge out of FTX’s cataclysmic crash last week was whether disgraced CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was as altruistic as he made himself out to be or whether he was just another crypto villain.

Unlike his crypto billionaire peers, SBF was known for being outspoken about his support for crypto regulation. He hobnobbed with government officials and donated money to political candidates to the ire of others in his industry. It put a target on his back and led to his rival, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), throwing him to the wolves.

CZ pleads his innocence, but he fails to see how SBF’s tactics pounded the nail in the crypto coffin. Regulation is coming. By making allies, SBF at least had a chance to have regulation on his own terms. The events of the past week (and year) have proven the skeptics right, and the true believers lost their shirts. Whatever his intentions, CZ ruined it for everybody. 

Crypto has lost all credibility, and government officials have to be salivating at the opportunity to regulate it. The crypto industry has revealed itself for the ugly, greedy, and corrupt mechanism that it is and it deserves to be regulated. In this scenario, everyone gets put in the corner. 

If anything is to be pulled from the wreckage it’s the digital asset and blockchain technology which have the potential to drive civilization forward, not some get-rich-quick-scheme. That’s what it was always about, but people got greedy and lost their way. If we take one lesson away from this, it’s this hard lesson.