GENIUS Act Passage Calls For Rethink Of Sam Bankman-Fried's Conviction
Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) shouldn't be in prison. All it takes to understand this is to remember that when SBF was forced to sign bankruptcy papers for FTX, a third of the crypto exchange's assets were the FTT coins issued by FTX. Which is the point.
Those coins were not 'money' in the traditional stablecoin sense, rather they were shares. As Michael Lewis clarified in Going Infinite (my review here),'The most important feature of FTT was that its holders were collectively entitled to roughly a third of the annual revenues of the FTX exchange.'
This is elemental when it comes to pushing back against the notion that SBF criminally arrogated customer funds to himself for trading and investing. More realistically, that was the purpose of housing money at FTX. Evidence supporting the previous claim can be found in the fact that the all-time high for FTT coins, a high reached in September of 2021, was $84. The FTX coins were a way for individuals who didn't understand the crypto market to gain exposure to it.
Crucial here is that if SBF hadn't been doing what presently has him behind bars, he wouldn't have had any money entrusted to him. See above. The customer assets at FTX were a speculation on SBF, and the view (arguably correct as evidenced by the recovery in FTX's assets after the bankruptcy) that he somewhat uniquely grasped the crypto future.
Which brings us to GENIUS, CLARITY, and other Acts meant to create a stable regulatory environment for the cryptocurrency present and future. The latter precisely explains why SBF was spending so much time in Washington. While self-proclaimed purists from the various political and economic religions vilified SBF's time in Washington as evidence of cronyism on his part, in truth it was SBF seeking a regulatory imprimatur for crypto that he deemed necessary for its positive evolution.
Some understandably disdain the tendency of business types to secure 'pull' in Washington, but the purists are yelling at the proverbial scoreboard. Until Washington retreats from commercial meddling, it will be necessary for those discovering a new future to make nice with the political class.
The passage of GENIUS, CLARITY and others like it vindicate what SBF was doing all along. He uniquely saw that a failure to institutionalize crypto regulation would render all the spade work done by himself and others moot. And so, he waded in the swamp.
Bringing it all to President Trump, it's time for him to pardon SBF. As opposed to a criminal, SBF somewhat uniquely saw a future that no one else did. What's easy to forget about those willing to risk it all in the face of endless ridicule is that there are stumbles along the way. If change were easy, or better yet, obvious, we would never have heard of SBF. We have because he did what no one else had the courage or the imagination to do.
To this day those who should know better view SBF as a crook or a fraudster, while also agreeing with his prison sentence, The bigger truth is that SBF's only error wasn't even an error: for a time the various crypto concepts that he actively traded and invested in went south. Stated simply, SBF sits in prison because the market for crypto coins briefly corrected. It's time for President Trump to correct this egregious error.
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