There’s no shortage of media coverage on Sam Bankman-Fried. He’s a 29-year old, vegan, crypto billionaire who skyrocketed to cult status after capitalizing on the kimchi premium (no not the fermented food – the arbitrage on South Korean cryptocurrency pricing). He then went on to build one of the largest, fastest growing digital asset exchanges in the world called FTX. Yet as I read more and more about him, I began to realize that the mainstream press was missing a more foundational story. It was Bankman-Fried’s worldview that jumped out. The “Bentham of Crypto,” Bankman-Fried had built his operating philosophy on notions of effective altruism and [utilitarianism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/#:~:text=Though the first systematic account,instead increase happiness or 'utility.) as pioneered by Jeremy Bentham. Bankman-Fried isn’t out to just be the richest crypto billionaire. He’s out to have the largest possible positive impact on the world. And to the extent money can deliver that, he’ll keep earning it.

officer of FTX, in Hong Kong, China, on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. FTX, the digital-assets trading platform launched two years ago by Bankman-Fried, said it handled enough volume last month to make it one of the largest crypto exchanges. Photographer: Lam Yik/Bloomberg

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Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and chief executive

Brendan Doherty: Sam, Welcome to Icons of Impact. For those not in crypto, they may not know you’ve built two explosive growth companies. Can you start by telling us about Alameda and FTX?

Sam Bankman-Fried: So, after graduating MIT I went to work at Jane Street Capital for about three and a half years. It was a wonderful work experience. I left Jane Street Capital to start on my own ideas and got into crypto.

The first business was Alameda, a crypto quantum trading firm. We saw that crypto was exhibiting all the signs that there would be a lot of demand for liquidity but with very little liquidity available. Everyone on the street was talking about crypto during that time. We were seeing huge price movements and inflows which clearly pointed to a lot of people from many different countries trying to buy many different varieties of crypto currencies using different acquisition methods. Despite how big it had become, it still had only been a few months. This meant that there had not been enough time for most of the buyers globally to onboard into the crypto ecosystem.

Doherty: So that was the opportunity you spotted, a lack of crypto infrastructure?

Bankman-Fried: Yes we were skeptical that there would be enough infrastructure to provide for the crypto market. This meant that demand would probably outstrip liquidity, and could lead to huge spreads on the market and really good trades. I got into crypto to see if what I expected would be true, and it was.

Doherty: So next came FTX?

Bankman-Fried: A year later we started to build out FTX. When I started in crypto exchanges, if you wanted to buy Apple AAPL, an average user would buy from somewhere like Robinhood where it would then change hands through clearing firms and other institutions. In late 2018, the current platforms were a total mess. They were losing an average of a million dollars a day to customer assets due to not having any functional retention. To me that was just a symptom of the problem but not the core problem itself. So it seemed like a huge gap and a pretty big space in the market. I thought we could do better. I wanted to incorporate the buyer, the seller, and the exchange. So we launched FTX in spring of 2019 and built it from nothing to where it sits today as the fourth largest global crypto currency exchange based outside of China.

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Trading trends and economic statistics.

Doherty: That is stunning growth. With that basis, I’d like to center the rest of our conversation on an area of your work that gets scant media coverage. You’re often in the press for your market-moving crypto trades and explosive growth. But I’m interested in something else, something much deeper: your worldview that animates all of the above. You’ve said you want FTX to have the largest possible positive impact on the world. Let’s begin there, where does that process start for you?

Bankman-Fried: So it depends on what the business is. For many of my friends their answer is to do unbelievably good things for the world just by working — choosing which organizations to work with and directly impacting important things. I think that piece often gets lost when effective altruism is talked about. For FTX, with all the focus on our entire budget, I think it’s easy to lose sight of who you give to and what is being done with those funds. But for me, the biggest piece of this is finding the most effective causes to donate to.

Doherty: You’ve previously talked about effective altruism as making the greatest amount of earnings to then be able to have the greatest amount of impact with that money afterward. I think there can be a tension in that. Some critics would say that thinking is part what got us into this economic inequality mess to start. How do you answer that tension?