177: Sam Bankman-Fried – Leaving Wall Street, entering crypto chaos

This episode features Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s trading skill originated from 3-years at Jane Street—a proprietary trading firm renown for being one of the world’s largest ETF liquidity providers.

In late-2017, Sam relocated to Hong Kong and began his foray into the cryptocurrency market when he co-founded Alameda Research. Alameda trade a range of quantitative strategies—such as statistical arbitrage and market making—which are mostly automated, but with a layer of human intervention.

Within 2-years Alameda has grown to a point, where each day, it does approximately one billion dollars of turnover across 35 exchanges, accounting for somewhere near 5% of global crypto volume.

Sam and I got to discuss many aspects of how Alameda operate and how his team have found lucrative opportunity amongst a chaotic environment…