SBF

Chapter 30Reef Finance

“If only people knew how balls long crypto Alameda has been.”

—SBF

On Twitter, March 17, 2021.

In March 2021, Alameda Research approached Reef Finance, a DeFi project that has a token called reef (REEF). When a dispute broke out between the two companies, according to Reef, Alameda threatened it with getting its token delisted.

It would be seven more months until SBF officially stepped down from his role as CEO of Alameda.

Reef is a stand‐alone blockchain (running using technology from the Polkadot blockchain) that's designed to be faster and cheaper than Ethereum, the category leader. Reef was made specifically with DeFi in mind.

Reef was a new project when its flap with Alameda broke out. It had only raised its seed round the previous September.

According to all accounts, Alameda did a deal for $20 million worth of reef tokens in March 2021, or 675 million reef, at a 20 percent discount. They had an agreement to sell another $60 million right afterward.

Then the Reef team watched as the same tokens immediately moved onto Binance, the biggest crypto exchange in the world. Soon, 50 million tokens left Binance and moved to FTX.

Sam Trabucco, then a trader with Alameda, told The Block that they hadn't sold even close to all that they had bought. It's possible that this is true. As market makers, they might have largely kept most of the reef in place on Binance for future trading. However, Trabucco would not answer The Block's question about how many ...