Same Starting Line, Different Paths

Every year, SBF’s FTX work anniversary resurfaces on my LinkedIn feed. He’s in federal prison, serving twenty-five years. The people he owed money to are finally getting paid — we’re one of them.

This piece is our side of that story. We started in the same market, at the same time, with the same playbook — the cross-border arbitrage era that seeded Alameda and, eventually, FTX. One path ran through outside capital, leverage, and customer deposits, and ended in one of the largest frauds in financial history. Ours ran through trading our own capital, every dollar at risk our own — including the week FTX froze, when our risk systems flagged the exchange before the public narrative caught up and we got most of our funds out.

Same starting line, different paths — and the difference wasn’t intelligence. It was operational discipline: the unglamorous machinery this series keeps returning to.

The full piece is being written. It publishes here — the same starting play, the collapse from the inside, and what eight years of divergence taught us about trust.