Alameda engineer's statement: SBF stole my life savings

Author: aditya_baradwaj

Compiled by: Block unicorn

As an engineer at Alameda Research, my entire life savings were stolen by my former boss Sam Bankman-Fried (everyone calls him SBF). Now, after a few crazy months following the collapse of FTX, I am ready to tell my story.

Let's start from the very beginning:

I still remember the first time I met Sam—it was my first day in the office. I had just left my job at Google and was excited to work at this small and mysterious crypto trading company. At that time, reports about Sam were just small news articles. In the tech circle, Alameda/FTX was not a well-known company. In fact, I knew about this company because some early employees had also studied at Berkeley, and this information reached me through word of mouth.

The office itself was unremarkable, located on the fourth floor of an ordinary office building in downtown Berkeley, a place I often passed by when I was in college.

On the directory, the name of the fourth-floor tenant appeared empty, only showing that they shared the building with names like "Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary," which was completely inconsistent with my expectations of a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency trading company.

When I walked into the office, SBF was sitting in the middle of the trading floor, talking on the phone while playing League of Legends.

Yes, that was Alameda's trading floor… Although on paper, Sam had transitioned to running FTX full-time, in reality, the two companies were highly intertwined. Joint offices, social events, and living arrangements between the two companies were the norm, but we'll talk about that later.

I wasn't sure who he was talking to, but I caught snippets of their conversation from SBF:

"Decentralization is the future. The most important thing you can do is to drop everything and join cryptocurrency."

This was one of the many contradictions I would see in SBF; on one hand, he would extol the virtues of decentralized, permissionless finance to anyone willing to listen. But a derivatives exchange that is custodial and requires intellectual property verification is not exactly a paragon of decentralization.

I guess everyone has two different thoughts inside them… or maybe something else.

What this means is that SBF was promoting the benefits of decentralized finance, but the company he founded, FTX, was a centralized exchange. This seems to be a contradiction.

Maybe SBF believed that decentralized finance is the future, but it is not yet mature enough and needs centralized exchanges to help it grow. Perhaps he thought that decentralized finance and centralized finance could coexist and play roles in their respective domains.

Maybe, deep down, SBF also harbored this contradiction. He wanted decentralized finance to succeed, but he also knew that centralized exchanges were still indispensable at that moment.

That night, we ordered Sliver Pizza and chatted while eating, and he revealed his plan to move the entire company to a small island in the Caribbean. At that time, I knew nothing about the Bahamas, but during the conversation with SBF, I could clearly sense that he had done his research.

SBF said, "Did you know that FTX's revenue exceeds 10% of the Bahamas' GDP?" I didn't know at the time, but after a quick search on Google, I found that he might not have been wrong at all.

SBF then elaborated on FTX's vision, which was more than just a cryptocurrency exchange: he talked about establishing a vaccine factory in the Bahamas to address unnoticed medical issues caused by the slow drug approval process of the FDA. He believed that due to the lengthy drug approval process, many people might die without timely access to treatment, like an invisible grave. He discussed the strategy of political donations made by FTX executives. He talked about future technologies that might emerge, such as iterative embryo selection, and the importance of not letting China dominate the field of basic biotechnology research. Of course, he also mentioned anti-malaria mosquito nets and veganism.

Hearing Sam's vision for the future, it was clear that every step he took—Alameda, FTX, the Bahamas, policy proposals—was part of a grand plan. He didn't want to build a company; he wanted to build a machine—a growing sphere of influence that could break free from the confines of that small office in Berkeley, spreading like a positive influence across the globe. Not just a company, but a monument to effective altruism.

As a new employee with dreams, it was hard not to be drawn in by SBF's vision. Many of us joined this company because we wanted to do something good in the world. And this billionaire, not yet 30, was using his wealth to support an unprecedented vision for the future.

Not to mention his humble and awkward demeanor; I think many people could find something relatable in him (which resonates with most talented individuals).

In the next year and a half, my life changed in ways I had never imagined.

I experienced luxuries I had only seen in movies, regularly flying between Berkeley, Hong Kong, and the Bahamas. I interacted with celebrities, sports idols, and political figures.

However, at the same time, I also witnessed irresponsible behavior. A company handling billions of dollars had a risk management approach that was reckless. Technical debt would make any software engineer feel sad, millions of dollars were wasted, and there was an arrogant attitude that believed it didn't matter.

Of course, SBF ultimately did not build the vaccine factory, nor did he eradicate malaria. His most trusted clients, investors, and employees found themselves in financial distress, and the unfinished FTX headquarters remained on the beaches of Nassau, becoming a ruin.

SBF himself is currently serving time in MDC prison for violating the conditions of his house arrest. Even after all this, he still seems unable to comply with the rules.

In the past few months, I have seen a lot of speculation online about FTX and Alameda. Unfortunately, not all of it is based on reality. What were Sam, Caroline, and others really like? Was it all just a scam? What was life like in the Bahamas? People deserve to know the truth.

Unfortunately, my experiences at FTX/Alameda are too complex to detail in a single article.