Crypto Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried Doles Out Credit Lines to Stem Contagion

(Bloomberg) — Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto billionaire who co-founded digital-asset exchange FTX Trading Ltd., is providing credit lines to try to stem contagions for his beleaguered industry.

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Crypto lending platform BlockFi Inc., which had been raising funds at a reduced valuation, said on Tuesday that it secured a $250 million revolving line of credit from FTX. Last week, crypto exchange Voyager Digital Ltd., whose shares are down 90% this year on Toronto Stock Exchange, got a $200 million credit line — a mix of cash and USDC stablecoins — as well as a separate, 15,000-Bitcoin revolving facility from Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s trading firm.

A wave of liquidation has triggered fear of contagion risks in the crypto industry, after a broad-based selloff in digital assets and the spectacular collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna tokens. Major lenders Celsius Network Ltd. and Babel Finance have frozen withdrawals, while crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital Ltd. is facing liquidity troubles.

“Sam Bankman-Fried is the new John Pierpont Morgan — he is bailing out cryptocurrency markets the way the original J.P. Morgan did after the crisis of 1907,” Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, said in an interview, referring to that year’s banking panic, which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Scaramucci said he’d invested alongside Bankman-Fried in several crypto ventures.

An FTX spokesperson, asked for comment about the credit lines, referred to a Twitter thread Tuesday from Bankman-Fried.

“We take our duty seriously to protect the digital asset ecosystem and its customers,” he wrote on Twitter.

In a recent interview with NPR, Bankman-Fried, 30, said he has a responsibility to consider stepping in, “even if it is at a loss to ourselves,” to stem contagions and help the industry thrive.

“This past weekend was critical in terms of finding white knights who could help develop a bid to stabilize this market,” Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer at asset-management firm Arca, wrote in a note Tuesday. “It doesn’t take a lot of capital right now to support prices and failing lenders, and there are a lot of players incentivized to ensure this industry doesn’t fail.”

Major crypto players have a history of bailing out key troubled firms. Last year, FTX provided $120 million debt financing for Liquid Group Inc. after hackers stole from the Japanese crypto exchange. FTX later acquired Liquid. In April, Binance led a $150 million round for the creator of popular game Axie Infinity to help restore user funds affected by a hack.

The latest financing provided by Bankman-Fried is “not unlike private equity shops that will invest more capital into portfolio companies amid distress — sometimes it’s enough, sometimes not,” said Noel Hebert, director of credit research at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Intra-crypto industry players are among the only ones with an incentive to lend here.”

Tom Dunleavy, senior research analyst at crypto-data firm Messari, said some would compare the move to Warren Buffett providing support to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2008.

It’s “a respected industry player supporting a systemically important firm with capital at a time where they think the bottom could be in, or close,” Dunleavy said. While recent liquidations have stemmed from the collapse of TerraUSD, he added, “the further we get from the Terra incident, the more things start to calm down, the less potentially broader liquidity issues we will see.”