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The US was now, in Sam’s mind, the holy grail. It had an incumbent crypto exchange, Coinbase. But Coinbase’s CEO had already written insulting tweets about the SEC. And Coinbase, compared to FTX, was a boring and bloated casino. It had fifteen times the number of employees FTX did, and only about a fifth of FTX’s volume. Charging retail investors fees between five and fifty times what FTX charged, it was still running big losses. Even so, it was a public company, with a market capitalization of more than $75 billion. If FTX was granted a license to offer crypto futures in the United States and was given full access to US investors, it might steal Coinbase’s customers, along with its market cap. Or so Sam thought—which is why he also thought that the license might double or even triple FTX’s value overnight.
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