Business & Economy
Sam Bankman-Fried: Crypto billionaire’s fortune rises by $7.7 billion as FTX hits $32 billion valuation
Sam Bankman-Fried: Crypto billionaire’s fortune rises by $7.7 billion as FTX hits $32 billion valuation.
In its latest Series C valuation, FTX has become a $32 billion worth company, blowing Sam Bankman-Fried’s net worth out of the water.
After seeing his valuation gain $7.7 billion within a day, the 29-year-old billionaire and founder of the crypto exchange now has a net worth of $22.2 billion.
FTX Series C funding round
FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, announced on Monday that it had raised $400 million in its Series C funding round, giving it a market value of $32 billion.
The valuation is up substantially from FTX’s last round of funding, when the company raised $420.69 million in a Series B-1 round at a valuation of $25 billion in October 2021.
In July 2021, FTX announced a Series B raise of 900 million dollars, later revised to $1 billion, for an estimated valuation of $18 billion.
Personal life
- According to Bloomberg sources, Bankman-Fried is believed to own 54% of the firm.
- A January 2022 fundraising round valued FTX US, a related U.S. arm of FTX, at $8 billion.
- Alameda Research, which invests in cryptocurrency with over $13 billion in assets, is almost entirely owned by Bankman-Fried.
- 1992 marked the birth of Sam Bankman-Fried in Stanford, California. He is the son of two Stanford Law professors.
- As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became interested in the idea of effective altruism, a phenomenon that encourages making the most of one’s resources to maximize the amount of good that can be done.
- Following graduation, he decided to pursue a career in trading rather than academics and joined a proprietary trading firm, Jane Street, which dealt in international exchange-traded funds. After working at Jane Street for three and a half years, Bankman-Fried left in 2017.
- Alameda Research was founded by him and Google engineer Gary Wang. Through its use of the cryptocurrency market, Alameda Research exploited arbitrage opportunities.
