In November of 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX was teetering on the brink. The final collapse came at the hands of Changpeng Zhao—"CZ" to everyone in the industry—who tweeted that his company Binance was dumping its entire position in FTX's house token, FTT. The fire sale, along with a ham-fisted attempt by Bankman-Fried to defend the token, triggered a panic and FTX was bankrupt days later.
This storyline is familiar to anyone who has followed the harrowing events of the crypto industry in the last year. Michael Lewis's new book, Going Infinite, however, reveals new details about the bitter rivalry between the two crypto kingpins, including how Zhao laid a trap for Bankman-Fried more than a year earlier that would let him deliver the coup-de-grace last fall.
