Sam Bankman-Fried Damaged The Crypto Image: Ava Labs CEO

Sam Bankman-Fried

According to Yahoo news, Emin Gun Sirer, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ava Labs shared his thoughts in a podcast. In which he talked about how his project Avalanche tackled the FTX crisis. And also how much damage the Founder of now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried has done to the image of crypto with VCs. He also mentioned that even after all this mess, the institutions are still confident in crypto. About Avalanche he further added that his project will succeed in the long run and try to cater both to Wall Street institutions and DeFi degens.

Who is Emin Gun Sirer?

Emin Gun Sirer, the Ava Labs founder is a veteran in cryptographic research. He designed a conceptual peer-to-peer virtual currency six years before the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper. And he was the part of Bitcoin scaling solutions and research on Ethereum before the infamous The DAO hack in 2016.

Emin Gun Sirer thoughts on Bankman-Fried doings

Ava Labs Founder said during a podcast that “the collapse of FTX dealt crypto a black eye, bruising the nascent industry’s reputation in terms of legitimacy and trust, while this damage is vast,” according to Yahoo news.

Gun Sirer said “the damage that Bankman-Fried did is immeasurable. All of that goodwill that we built over many years of hard work is just usurped by some guy who comes in and puts on this boy genius act.”

Ava Labs founder has seen the crypto industry “blossom from nothing” into what it is today. The thought of how far Bankman-Fried set the crypto industry back is something that keeps Gun Sirer up at night, he added, “conscious of shifting tides in regulatory circles that could be “very bad” for those that are involved in crypto.”

Since last summer when the prices of digital assets dropped down, the reputation of Bankman-Fried ascended to new heights. He was compared to John Pierpont Morgan in 1907 for rushing to save embattled crypto firms.

Then in November 2022, the reputation of Bankman-Fried swung in reverse direction as his crypto exchange FTX collapsed. The exchange filed for bankruptcy after a run on the exchange was sparked by a steep drop in exchange’s FTT token. That revealed FTX did not have 1:1 reserves of customer assets and could not honor withdrawals.

Bankman-Fried then got arrested and charged with a litany of financial crimes, ranging from fraud to money laundering and for allegedly misappropriating billions of dollars worth of customers’ funds. However, he pleaded not guilty yet.

Meanwhile, Gun Sirer attributed the lack of scrutiny that Bankman-Fried received to the image the FTX founder cultivated, from his “tousled hair” to spending “so much on marketing that the world [treated] him as a genius that cannot be questioned.”

Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/02/27/sam-bankman-fried-damaged-the-crypto-image-ava-labs-ceo/