SBF

Chapter 28Sam Coins

SBF had a busy run of launching tokens in 2020 and 2021, and it paid off.

Until it didn't.

I came into crypto covering new tokens, but after a while I became cynical about launches. It's suspicious that folks are so eager to talk when something is beginning. I found that often I'd write something and then never hear about the project again. Eventually, it felt more responsible to pass until something has come of the project and its token.

Of course, at that point, it might be going so well that the leaders don't feel a need to talk to you any longer.

Ignoring new stuff was basically my approach in 2020. Take the launch of the new token comp, from Compound. It was coming out on top of a project I first learned about in 2018. Two years may not sound that long, but crypto moves fast. Two years later, Compound was basically a Knight of the Table Round, as far as proven DeFi projects went.

So I was happy to cover comp, but if some other project wanted to launch with a token from day one and expected me to be just as interested, my attitude was, “No, thank you” (usually, though circumstances could create exceptions—see: SushiSwap).

Even as I started to realize that SBF and the FTX empire had become uniquely powerful, my attitude through 2020 and early 2021 was that his new projects on Solana sounded fine, but I wanted to wait and see.

There are, by my reckoning, four big Sam tokens (five if you count Solana's sol—and many would).

A note: Through most of this book ...