A lot of people have gotten rich quickly. Sam Bankman- Fried is one of the few who has gotten rich quicker.
He is worth $24.5 billion according to Forbes.
Bankman-Fried told Insider that it was probably a little higher now.
The FTX exchange, which Bankman-Fried co-founded in 2019, is now one of the biggestcryptocurrencies-trading venues in the world.
The exchange reached a valuation of $32 billion last month after raising $400 million from investment firms. The US spinoff is worth $8 billion.
FTX exchange is more valuable than the other two. It's a three-year-old company.
After graduating from MIT with a physics degree, Bankman-Fried went to work for Jane Street, a Wall Street trading firm. Three years later, he founded Alameda Research, a firm that made big money by taking advantage of price discrepancies in global markets.
He realized that the existing exchanges were glitchy, unsafe, and had no customer support.
He said that these are really important, valuable systems and that we can do better than this.
Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang thought they had the technical know-how to build an exchange.
The key question was whether they could attract customers.
Gradually customers came. People were talking about the new exchange on social media. FTX had 5 million users by the end of the year, with daily volume peaking at a record $60 billion in May.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried gets by on 4 hours of sleep and 6 screens. The tough questions facing his company are broken down by Insiders.
Bankman-Fried says that crashes are extremely rare. The policy of allowing traders to have one account in which margin balances offset each other is drawing traders to it. Margin is borrowing money from a broker to trade with.
They like FTX's derivatives, which allow them to bet on the future price of major token such as ethereum.
As a hub of risky trading activity, FTX is in the sights of regulators and law-makers.
Bankman-Fried was in Congress last week, where he was asked if it was reckless for companies to sell Americans a dangerous product.
Roughly 50% of FTX users are individual and institutional investors. High-frequency trading firms, hedge funds and family offices are responsible for 80% of the revenue and volume. That is different from the US's biggest exchange, which derives most of its revenue from retail traders.
FTX had four employees at the beginning. FTX is worth $4 billion less thanDeutsche Bank, which has more than 80,000.
Bankman-Fried says he doesn't feel pressure to take the exchange public.
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