Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, has many regrets. But chief among them is the one that may have directly led to his company's downfall.
While lobbying for favorable crypto regulation in Washington, D.C., Bankman-Fried in meetings privately criticized Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the rival exchange Binance. Word about the whisper campaign got back to Zhao, who ultimately set off a run by FTX's customers to withdraw their deposits by tweeting that he would sell off his huge holdings in that company's in-house cryptocurrency, FTT.
