Sam Bankman-Fried has become immensely prominent in the crypto community for his swagger and investment skill. Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF in the industry, is the founder of the popular FTX exchange. He is a maverick trader who likes to make moonshot bets.
SBF is also the founder and CEO of Almeda Research LLC, a quantitative trading firm specializing in crypto currency and digital asset markets. According to Alameda’s co-founder, the company trades about $1 billion worth of Bitcoin per day, accounting for about 5% of the worldwide Bitcoin trading volume.
Solana Labs, a decentralized finance project developer, raised $314.2 million in June from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and SBF’s Alameda Research.
In a Twitter exchange with a crypto investor known as Coinmamba in January, SBF placed one such bet. Coinmamba started the exchange after taking a short position on Solana, a new blockchain whose native cryptocurrency, SOL, was trading between $2 and $3 at the time. SBF retaliated by making a series of public approaches to purchase Coinmamba’s stake in SOL.
The exchange’s final tweet was a mic-drop moment, with SBF stating, “I’ll buy as much SOL [as] you have, right now, at $3. Sell me all you want. Then go fuck off.”
SOL hit a high of above $200 per coin earlier this week. Since the Twitter conversation, there has been a more than 6000 percent increase. If the deal had gone through, it would have been one of the greatest exchanges in history.
After earning tremendous global attention, Solana has ascended to become the world’s sixth largest cryptocurrency.
