FTX Crypto Exchange CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s Breakout Month

August has been a good month for Sam Bankman-Fried, the increasingly high-profile CEO of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

That may seem a little strange to say, given that his was one of four cryptocurrency exchanges singled out by a congressional committee’s Aug. 30 demand for information about what the industry is doing to protect consumers against fraud.

But the request by the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy can be seen as just the latest sign that the 30-year-old billionaire is taking up a broader role in the industry.

With his shock of curly hair and insistence on wearing shorts at all times — except when testifying before Congress — Bankman-Fried is becoming a recognizable presence both in the crypto industry and outside of it.

That role was long the exclusive domain of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong — as a go-to person for mainstream business media looking for a “face” of crypto. But with Coinbase struggling with serious trading declines and a tumbling stock price, Bankman-Fried is stepping into the role.

The Aug. 20 CNBC report leaking that privately held FTX’s revenue grew 1,000% in 2021 bolstered that.

See more: FTX Revenue Reportedly Grew 10x in 2021

This despite the reality that while FTX is one of the largest crypto exchanges, very little of that comes from the U.S., where it sister exchange, FTX.US, only had $290 million in 24-hour volume on Aug. 31, compared to the non-U.S. exchange’s $2.2 billion.

Inside the Beltway

Also on Aug. 30, it came out that Bankman-Fried, along with two senior FTX policy and government relations executives, had a May White House meeting with Biden administration policy advisor Charlotte Butash and counselor Steve Ricchetti.

Bankman-Fried, who has been both spending and pledging a fortune on political donations for the last couple of years — including up to $1 billion in the next Presidential election cycle — met with them during an industrywide push to have cryptocurrencies regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) instead of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), CoinDesk reported.

While the crypto industry as a whole has seen its lobbying power spike in the last year, Bankman-Fried — who has been putting in more facetime than most CEOs do when their firms are lobbying in Washington — was able to get FTX a much higher-level hearing.

‘Saving Crypto’

Then on Wednesday (Aug. 31), Bloomberg dropped a series of five stories based on an interview with Bankman-Fried, including one titled “Bankman-Fried Happy to Be Called the JP Morgan of Crypto” and another about his past decision to sign Warren Buffet’s “Giving Pledge” to donate his wealth in his lifetime.

The former referred to his June announcement that he was going to bail out struggling crypto firms to the tune of $1 billion. A week earlier, that was the subject of a Wall Street Journal profile focused on his two-month-old efforts to set himself up as the man who wants to “save crypto” — a narrative that lost a little steam after he started getting accused of trying to snap up “saved” companies for a song.

Also read: Is One of Crypto’s Richest Billionaires Becoming its ‘Lender of Last Resort?’

Read more: Crypto Companies Seeking Saviors Find Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Instead

Still, the importance of that role as a lender of last resort for the industry has become a big enough deal that when he refuted rumors that he was buying rival exchange Huobi, the price of its native cryptocurrency exchange token dropped 6%.

FTX has had other successes, including a deal announced at the beginning of the month that Reddit will use his payments technology arm, FTX Pay, to use the community points  earned by content and community contributors on the massive social media site to pay crypto transaction fees.

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