Sam Bankman-Fried Reveals 'Hindsight' As Wildly Sight-Impairing

“Genesis Digital was ‘one of Bankman-Fried’s most reckless investments.’” That's from the Wall Street Journal, in an article citing the views of the bankruptcy team that sold it off.

FTX invested $1.15 billion in Genesis Digital, only for the bankruptcy administrators to sell it for $500 million in June of 2026. The Journal reports it’s presently worth over $6 billion. And so it goes.

With it continues the fiction that FTX account holders were storing savings with the crypto brokerage, and that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried "stole" $8 billion of their savings before going on a wild, fraudulent spending spree with their money. Here lies the problem with hindsight. The clarity it provides too often blurs the vision of those who revel in “knowing” the knowns.

Back to reality about FTX, the placement of money with it was plainly an investment in Sam Bankman-Fried’s knowledge of the crypto industry, and the technology sector more broadly. Having in a very real way invented the crypto space, the placement of money with FTX and Bankman-Fried (SBF) was a proxy for exposure to a different currency, investing, and technological future.

Evidence supporting this claim can be found in what Michael Lewis reported in Going Infinite. At the time of FTX’s forced bankruptcy in November of 2022, a third of FTX’s assets were FTT coins. Ownership of these coins came with ownership of 1/3 rd of FTX’s profits. Yes, the FTT coins were shares in FTX, and yet again proxies for SBF’s investment acumen.

Crucial about the coins is that they were decidedly not a savings vehicle. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in the fact that they initially fetched.15/FTT upon issuance. By 2021, those same FTT coins were selling for $85. Which requires a pause.

SBF sits in prison for “misappropriation of customer funds." Ok, but where were the regulators and where were customer demands to liquefy their FTX accounts when the coins were on the way up?

SBF's “crime” wasn’t misappropriation of funds as evidenced by the sanguine nature of regulation when FTT coins were soaring, rather his “crime” was a challenging market for cryptocurrencies from 2021 to 2022. Absent the latter, he’s a much bigger hero today and no one’s telling us after the fact that the 200+ VCs who invested with him “should have known.”

Evidence supporting this claim can be found in another investment SBF made, specifically a $500 million allocation to a then-unknown Anthropic. The latter secured for FTX an 8% stake. As readers know, Anthropic is set to float its shares at a high valuation, possibly $2 trillion.

Too bad the team handling FTX’s bankruptcy seemingly viewed Anthropic as yet another "reckless" bet by SBF. FTX's stake was sold for $1.3 billion. And so it goes.

Implied all along in the bankruptcy aftermath for FTX was that $8 billion worth of customer funds was “missing,” but that missed the point per Lewis that as far back as 2022, on any given day FTX had assets worth tens of billions. Yes, FTX account holders were investors, not savers.

Which is the point, or should be. As Lewis noted, everything “missing” from customer funds was invariably there. Fast forward to the present, just think how much those “missing” funds would be worth today if still where they always were. What do FTT coins sell for???

Instead, SBF sits in prison for having seen and subsequently bet on a different future. More criminalization of failure, all because hindsight might be the most sight-impairing view of all.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.