This is actually one of the wildest finance stories of all time.
Sam Bankman-Fried (the guy who blew up FTX) was actually one of the best venture investors of the last decade.
Here is what Alameda was holding when FTX collapsed:
Cursor: $200k into what is now worth around $3 billion.
Anthropic: $500M into a stake now valued at $75 billion.
Robinhood: $648M stake now worth around $5 billion.
Genesis Digital: ~$1.15B into a position now worth $3 billion.
SpaceX: ~$100M into a position now worth $10 billion.
If FTX had never gone bankrupt, those positions alone would be worth over $114 billion today.
That would put SBF in the top 20 richest people on the planet right now.
The investing was actually right. The rest of the operation was the problem.
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i have a buddy who ran up $1K to $200K during covid, blew his port twice since then. he's now up $2.7M trading stocks in the last 3-6 months. i've talked to people recently who don't know what a market cap is or do any research about stocks they buy and just use AI to pick stocks to trade for them and they're up 100% on their portfolio this year.
dumb money is coming to crypto soon and the last time this happened it lead to dogecoin hitting $88 billion+ market cap.
be on the lookout for substantially higher ceilings for memecoins once again and bitcoin starting to rally as people take profits from stocks and rotate. screenshot this because i know i'm right on this one
Really, really major bottoms happen when almost everyone agrees there's no reason for said asset to ever pump again.
Uranium in 2019, dead. Useless. We will never again need antiquated, risky energy tech like nuclear power plants.
Gold... a laughable rock, good for party tricks and pet rocks. Actually useless. Throwing shade at Peter Schiff is the easiest game ever.
Now it's the last resort against out of control government spending and everyone is scrambling to own some.
Case and point: when the world is telling you that the crypto experiment is over, never to rise again, and you yourself even start to believe it, that just means were building crypto's equivelant of uranium and golds secular bottom before a truly amazing run that leaves the masses stunned and sidelined.
The amount of crusty tradfi guys taking this to mean Bitcoin when Bessent is absolutely talking about stables, and assuming that means BTC is a govt honeypot… Just shows how far we are from having basic education on this asset class. Light years.
Everyone should be paying close attention here. Civil suit related to an external depositor has now gotten a smart contract with public funds frozen by Circle.
This is a big precedent, and feels like it’s downstream of the Kelp incident waking people up to the dangers that civil suits pose to DeFi
Perpetuals have no expiry and never physically deliver. In the U.S., that pushed them into the futures framework: DCM execution, DCO clearing, FCM intermediation, and CCP-style margining.
To be compliant, U.S. perps had to take two steps back to fit this legacy system. For example, instead of simply listing a crypto-native perp, Coinbase Derivatives acquired a DCM, worked through Nodal Clear, and structured its product as a five-year, cash-settled futures contract, with funding handled through clearinghouse cash adjustments.
This framework therefore created a lot of complexity:
-Exchanges can’t list any asset they want. They need to be a DCM, acquire a DCM, or list through one.
-Expiries, funding, and settlement mechanics need to be adjusted to fit legacy infrastructure.
Importantly, it structurally prevents brokers from using exchanges like Hyperliquid that do not meet the legacy criteria of a DCM.
While this new order does not remove those complexities, it does allow a true no-expiry BTC perp instead of the five-year expiry workaround.
Still, it points to the CFTC genuinely being willing to innovate and make perps fit into existing frameworks. Over time, hopefully that framework expands to also include crypto-native exchange layers like Hyperliquid as true market layers.
Dell
Nokia
Intel
Qualcomm
Micron
The hottest stocks in the market right now. Did i just time travel back in time 26 years? Is this May 2000, or May 2026?