Sam Bankman-Fried’s Magic Money Box Enriched Vast Crypto Network

In hindsight, Sam Bankman-Fried’s April interview with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast was a harbinger of his epic collapse last week. He described a “box” that has value only because other people put money in it, and, when confronted with the idea that he described a Ponzi scheme, admitted there was a “depressing amount of validity” to that.

But what’s only now becoming clear is just how much of his cash, which ascribed value to countless crypto projects out of thin air, was coming from his complex web of 130-plus now-bankrupt entities.

A prominent example is Serum, one of the ...