01
Potential intent of political donation
On November 5th, as the results of the US presidential election were about to be announced, a burst of news swept through most of the cryptocurrency market. According to data from the campaign fund tracking website Open Secret, FTX exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried (hereinafter referred to as SBF) Donated US$5.2 million to the campaign of US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the number of which is second only to Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg among CEO donors.
At the same time, SBF was exposed by the media as a member of the Democratic Super PAC (Political Action Committee) Future Forward. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are both members of the PAC. a member of.
In the U.S. presidential election, political donations from outsiders are a common political behavior. Many interest groups use donations and other actions to help promising candidates run for the president, in order to bring more policy benefits to their own fields and gain more economic benefits. And social interests.
The political donation made by the SBF to the Biden camp is the largest known donation by people in the cryptocurrency field in the presidential campaign. It also reflects the growing influence of the cryptocurrency market on the global society and a better policy environment. The appeal. In the past year, many people in the cryptocurrency field announced their participation in the presidential election, but the significance of public relations is greater than the real significance, and direct political donations are more effective for the industry.
Although Biden has not clearly expressed his views on the blockchain and the cryptocurrency market so far, another candidate Trump has publicly stated on Twitter that I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They are not. Money, their value fluctuates too much and their foundation is very weak. Unregulated crypto assets may promote behavior that is not regulated by law, including drug dealing and other illegal activities…
This attitude also led Trump to fail to promote any legislative actions that are beneficial to cryptocurrency regulation at the federal government level during his four-year tenure as President of the United States. At the same time, the federal government has set many for the launch of Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra and Bitcoin ETF. Obstacles . Although the financial regulatory departments of some local governments have relevant license systems, the review process and business requirements are also extremely strict, and the encryption industry has many complaints.
The FTX exchange founded by SBF has made many innovative and radical attempts in the trading of crypto-asset derivatives, such as the launch of leverage tokens, platform tokens, etc. It is difficult to meet the compliance requirements of the US regulatory authorities and cannot provide services to US customers , Causing great restrictions on their own development space.
In addition, four executives of the established futures exchange BitMEX have recently been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. Another well-known blockchain project Ripple recently claimed that it is considering moving its headquarters out of the United States. Blockchain and digital currency are not affected in the United States. Welcome, the SEC’s position is just to shatter and push it away, so much so that we are considering moving the headquarters to a more regulatory-friendly jurisdiction. Chris Larsen, the executive chairman of Ripple, publicly stated that Ripple does not want to avoid rules, but only wants to operate in jurisdictions with clear rules.
On the other hand, Biden actually has the support of many financial and technology companies. Data on the Open Secret website shows that Google’s parent company Alphabet, the well-known incubator Y Combinator, well-known hedge funds Renaissance Technologies and Paloma Partners, etc., reflect their views on Biden after taking office. Confidence and expectations for the implementation of the New Deal.
In fact, similar incidents have occurred countless times in American society in the past, and they have become part of the American power game and rules. According to KelloggInsight research, during the 2016 US presidential election, oil companies, energy departments, and fossil fuel companies have all donated large sums of money to Trump’s campaign. Two months after taking office, Trump approved the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. The project was terminated by President Obama, but Trump overturned this decision and made it a priority.
Therefore, the purpose of SBF’s behavior is not difficult to analyze. The first level is that he believes that Biden’s election is more beneficial to the cryptocurrency market, at least not as clear as Trump’s suppression. The second level is to try to pay respects based on this. Make a good announcement and close the relationship, and seek a better policy environment for the cryptocurrency market and even its own business. After all, this is the second largest donation after Democratic Party leader Michael Bloomberg.
02
Expansion of trading thinking
In fact, in the eyes of the SBF, the US presidential election is not only a major event affecting the direction of the US cryptocurrency regulatory policy, but also a “ fragrant ” that brings more direct commercial benefits to its own business .
If it were not for the sudden exposure of that website, SBF’s political donation to Biden would still be unknown. His more influence in the US general election came from the presidential election contract launched by FTX. The futures contract was officially launched in February of this year, allowing investors to invest and obtain income based on their expected judgments on the outcome of the general election. The value is set between 0-1 US dollars. If users buy Trump at a market price of 0.3 US dollars Winning the contract, if Trump wins, the value of a single contract will be $1 and the profit will be more than three times, otherwise the price will be zero.
Since the launch of the contract for more than half a year, the price of the Biden contract winning contract has long been higher than the Trump winning contract, which reflects that FTX users have expressed a more optimistic view of Biden’s willingness to win the election through actual capital investment. At the same time, the contract has almost become one of the main windows for a large number of people in the cryptocurrency industry to observe the trend of the US general election. Many media will report on the price trend of the election contract of the FTX exchange, which indirectly brings a lot of exposure to the exchange and attracts more Multi-trading users.
In the same period, SFB has frequently published its opinions on the election situation and corresponding contract trends on Twitter in recent times, which is equivalent to building momentum for its election contract products, and these various measures have indeed received positive results. On November 4, on the most intense day of the US presidential election, the total transaction volume of four contract products involved in the presidential election on the FTX platform reached more than 30 million U.S. dollars, bringing a large number of new users and revenue to the platform.
According to The Block report, an FTX executive stated that adding a political market allows FTX to obtain an additional source of income. When all the dust settles, FTX may earn more than $1 million from the election contract market it launched.
After this incident, combined with the already available through equity certificate, FTX farther and farther on the target covered “the whole category of commodities in the secondary market”, the encryption “innovator” in the world in the field of derivatives trading, the image of a “champion” has gone deep Human heart . And all of this is largely due to SBF’s distinctive personal characteristics and trading thinking.
According to public information, SBF graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s ace major in physics, and then worked as an over-the-counter trader for three years at the well-known quantitative company Jane Street. Trading in ETF, futures, currency and stocks has been involved, forming a training team. Simple and systematic trading thinking. I am used to the speed and response of transactions, and I have been creating around this for the rest of my life. When talking about this experience in an interview, SBF said that when things go slowly, it must annoy me very much.
At the end of 2017, SBF entered the cryptocurrency market, successively established the crypto quantitative company Alameda and the crypto trading platform FTX, and invested in dozens of crypto companies at the same time. It gradually emerged as one of the important strengths in the crypto world, with its rapid response capabilities and rich market methods. In this process, it plays an important role, promoting SBF to take swift and decisive actions in a number of important events in the cryptocurrency market, and significantly expand its interests and influence.
During the outbreak of the DeFi market in the middle of the year, according to the chain news report, SBF pledged a large amount of FTT, SUSHI and SRM on the decentralized lending platform Cream Finance, and at the same time loaned out valuable ETH and USDT, as well as UNI, MTA, CREAM, A variety of DeFi coins such as LINK, and short selling on the trading platform to obtain huge benefits. However, SBF has also been criticized for this, such as using its own centralized tokens to manipulate the price of decentralized assets.
SBF, who is busy with trading and business, often sleeps and rests in the company
Since then, in the case of the SushiSwap DEX project, SBF gained the trust of the founder of the project through positive suggestions in the community, obtained the private key control of the most popular project in the market at that time, and received unprecedented attention from the encryption industry. The influence of the industry has once again risen to a new level.
The various actions taken by SBF in this U.S. presidential election are the continuation of its influence expansion strategy, and further reflect that he is no longer satisfied with expanding his influence in the severely restricted crypto world, and has begun to seek political influence for the industry and himself. Open the way. Judging from the SBF’s refusal to interview many media on the political donation incident and Twitter’s silence, he is unwilling to further show his political aspirations and wishes to the public, but this has already triggered a lot of speculation from the outside world.
If SBF’s actions play a practical role, this is not only a victory for SBF and its company, but also a great benefit for the development of the cryptocurrency industry, and SBF is also likely to remain in the cryptocurrency industry.
