SBF

Chapter 19Black Thursday

It's almost as if the blockchain gods gave everyone a warning that the next upswing would take a dark turn.

It was March 2020. The world had accepted the reality of a global pandemic, many people were coming down with COVID‐19, hospitals hadn't learned to cope, and horrific imagery of straining health care systems was on the news every night, but people in the crypto world were facing the disease a bit more stoically than the rest of the populace of the US, partly because crypto's most notable had been sounding warnings about the disease since December.

They had been castigated in the press for being paranoid or worse, but they had doggedly masked up their  Twitter profile pictures and stood their ground far earlier than the mainstream. So when March came and the general populace was rapidly moving from denial to acceptance of COVID‐19, crypto people were a stage or two ahead. Instead, they were watching the global markets.

Blockchain types were in denial about something else, however. They were in denial about the broader economy dragging crypto assets down with it. That's something that people in the space tend not to be well prepared for. The notion that digital assets were uncorrelated with the rest of the market was breaking down.

Once when SBF went on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, he told the hosts, “An interesting thing about crypto and the ecosystem. So one thing is: everyone is bullish in crypto, on crypto, and that has a massive impact on ...