Brace yourself for Thanksgiving. “Going Infinite,” the new Sam Bankman-Fried biography by Michael Lewis, is about to send your aunt and uncle hurtling backwards in their understanding of what you do in crypto, and why. Though it tells a detailed and sometimes riveting story of one man’s rise and fall, when it comes to portraying the web3 community accurately, the book is a wet market of sloppy thinking that I feel compelled to address lest it spread mind viruses in the mainstream audience we fight so hard to reach with facts.
For those of us who’ve spent over a decade in this industry driven by core values – championing transparent rules, root ownership of assets, and permissionless access to finance – Sam Bankman-Fried has been poisoning the information ecology around crypto since his first trip to Washington, D.C.
Amanda Cassatt is the CEO of Serotonin.
SBF sought to invest financially in politicians in exchange for regulation that would protect FTX. The regulation he tried to buy would have created insurmountable barriers for actual decentralized finance protocols (that never custody user funds and operate transparently and permissionlessly on-chain) to achieve market share competing with FTX, whose business model, a centralized exchange, has existed intact for centuries, and that notably, did not offer customers direct ownership of any crypto assets, merely indirect access with no root ownership (obviating the actual benefit of blockchain) to the upside from them.
Cut to Michael Lewis on Monday’s “60 Minutes” on CBS describing his first meeting with SBF, the result of a friend who was considering investing in FTX asking the bestselling nonfiction author to “evaluate his character” (reminder to self: do not ask Michael Lewis for investment advice). Awestruck after a hike with SBF in the Berkeley Hills, Lewis spots an opportunity for himself to document SBF’s life. Lo and behold, SBF agrees, and after “two years speaking for countless hours,” Lewis comes in hot with a real knee slapper: How is it that in an industry where people don’t trust banks or governments, they trust FTX with all that money? That’s hilarious! Lewis and CBS casually conflate FTX with crypto, and custodial CeFi with DeFi, which was created and successfully functions today to combat this…
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