‘Cryptomania’ reveals the true cost of SBF’s charitable facade

Yes, I am reviewing another book on Sam Bankman-Fried.

But just because this is the fifth book in an unrelated series of various authors trying to understand how Bankman-Fried blew up a billion dollar empire doesn’t mean you should write it off as been there, done that. Andrew Chow’s new book “Cryptomania” covers something that none of the other Bankman-Fried books really looked into — how FTX and Bankman-Fried ’s charitable plans adversely affected the very people that he claimed to want to help: the unbanked and disenfranchised. 

While Chow’s book is definitely an attempt to answer the question of how the crypto industry ended up where it is today, it’s much more interesting than just a general overview of FTX’s crypto collapse (or a fawning profile of Bankman-Fried). Instead, Chow’s in-depth research into the African NFT and crypto scene centers the book in something real and tangible and horribly hypocritical. Reading about Nigerian artist Owo Anietie’s somewhat successful AfroDroids NFT launch was eye-opening. This book’s take on what happened to the African NFT scene when FTX imploded did more to humanize the FTX fallout than any other Bankman-Fried book I’ve read thus far.

Read more: SBF’s ambitions went too far, judge says when handing down 25-year sentence

As Chow writes, “Africa was central to Sam’s vision. Investing in the Mother Continent allowed him to play the role of both selfless philanthropist and digital colonizer. He felt he could do a large amount of good for cheap while also profiting off the urgent ambition of many in a young generation desperate to break out of cycles of disinvestment, authoritarianism and poverty […] Sam was happy to take shortcuts in terms of security and centralization if it meant that more people bought in.”

Chow says that by one estimation, half of the participants of Africa’s NFT community left after the FTX crash.

What Bankman-Fried and FTX left behind in the Bahamas was no different. Chow continues:

“Sam, like the generations of colonizers before him, had settled in the Caribbean and intended to remake the country in his own image […].

Disputes arose over whether the Bahamian employees were matching the work ethic of their international peers. It was an eerie shadow of a long history of racial segregation in Nassau.”

What Chow does in this latest Bankman-Fried treatise is go in-depth on a problem that plagues the crypto space today. Namely, how a technology based on the idea of freeing people from the constraints of a flawed economic system has been used to engender a community with such different goals. Chow focuses on Bankman-Fried’s very publicly stated effective altruistic intentions and then juxtaposes those ideas with his actions. In doing so, the author provides necessary context to understand why the 2022 crypto collapse was so darn disappointing — far beyond investors and traders just losing money.

Read more from our opinion section: Given one more chance to defend himself, SBF blew it

For instance, Chow writes about one former FTX employee growing an understanding of how the company’s charitable intentions were changing:

“Christine realized she had strayed extremely far from her initial mission to help people. She wasn’t even donating her salary to charitable causes, as many effective altruists at FTX, including Sam, no longer believed it made rational sense to give away money from each paycheck. Instead, they thought that it was more effective to take the money they earned and invest it so they’d be able to give far more money later on. Christine eventually realized these actions looked identical to those of any money-obsessed trader with no higher purpose.”

As we move further away from the FTX disaster and the bad taste it left behind, books like these are crucial. They can help prevent the crypto industry from repeating its mistakes. Focusing solely on how the 2022 crypto collapse affected the markets misses the wider picture. The deeper damage it did to the very unbanked communities that crypto was intended to support will keep the industry in a rut.

So if we need another five Sam Bankman-Fried books to be written in order to stop crypto from re-entering one of its harmful boom-bust cycles, that’s fine by me.

I don’t care much about tech, I don’t care a whole lot about finance, either. I care about writing stories and watching weird things unfold. And that’s why I’ve ended up in crypto.

But because I’m missing that passion for what crypto and blockchain are all about — finance, tech, privacy, yadda yadda — I’m going to write instead about what I am actually interested in. Everything about crypto that has very little to do with crypto.

That’s what this column will be about. All the tangential stories that come out of the blockchain and crypto space, what I think about them, and how I navigate it all as a skeptical former Russian literature major.

It’s precisely my perch as an outsider that lets me do what I do: Opine on all sides of any crypto issue, no strings attached, no skin in the game.

If you want to talk crypto with me, let’s go off topic.

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