Up until last week, Sam Bankman-Fried looked destined to go down in crypto history as a hero—for helping bring digital currency into the mainstream, and for spearheading a philanthropic movement some heralded as a sign of the sector’s maturity and growing stability.
The 30-year-old Bankman-Fried, who at the peak of his fortune was worth $26 billion, was the founder of FTX, a crypto exchange that had quickly become one of the world’s biggest. He had cultivated an image as a kind of new-style magnate, a major donor to the Democratic party in the U.S., and among Joe Biden’s largest donors in 2020.
