SBF

Chapter 14Beginning FTX

In October 2018, Sam Bankman‐Fried was thinking about what's wrong with exchanges.

David Gan, then a venture investor on the team at another exchange, Huobi, was crashing at a friend's house during 2018's San Francisco Blockchain Week. His friend hosted a party while he was there for crypto enthusiasts, and that's where Gan first met SBF.

“I think I talked to him for 11 hours straight,” Gan said. SBF just wouldn't stop, and he wasn't leaving as everyone else did.

SBF cornered him to talk about crypto exchanges, and what he thought about Huobi in particular. They talked about crypto exchanges and nothing but exchanges till dawn, even though trading wasn't what Gan was responsible for at Huobi. He thought then, and still does, about start‐ups.

“I'm not that big of a trader. I didn't understand all the intricacies,” Gan said.

But Gan said he found it interesting to hear all this detail about the exchange business and the minute observations about his employer's product from this obsessive trader.

Later, SBF produced a four‐ or five‐page memo on what he thought about Huobi and how it could be better. Gan said he presented it to higher‐ups at Huobi, but no one knew who SBF was then. The executives didn't take the memo seriously.

According to the CFTC account, SBF and his cofounder, Gary Wang, must have been already working on the software that would become FTX, with their developer team.

They moved to Hong Kong before launching, making the transition in 2019, ...