Organization
Alameda Research
Crypto trading firm that Ray said relied on customer funds deposited directly from FTX.
Stories on Angle
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara Mac Aulay. In November 2022, Alameda's sister cryptocurrency exchange FTX experienced a solvency crisis that resulted in both companies filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That same month, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal that FTX had loaned more than half of its customers' funds to Alameda.
At Bankman-Fried's trial, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison testified that she was one of Bankman-Fried's main accomplices in channeling FTX customer funds into Alameda's coffers. In December 2022, Ellison pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and five conspiracy counts involving wire, securities and commodities fraud and money laundering, in relation to her activities at Alameda Research and FTX.
History
In November 2017, Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded Alameda Research as a quantitative trading firm, after he left his job at Jane Street Capital. The firm was based in Berkeley, California, where Bankman-Fried moved that same year. He had recruited about 20 young effective altruists, most of whom had no experience trading in financial markets nor were aware of cryptocurrencies. Per a 2021 interview, the term 'research' was included in the name to avoid scrutiny, with Bankman-Fried saying, "if you named your company like We Do Cryptocurrency Bitcoin Arbitrage Multinational Stuff, no one's going to give you a bank account".
In January 2018, Bankman-Fried organized an arbitrage trade to take advantage of the higher price of bitcoin in Japan versus in America. The company earned between $10 million and $30 million before the price gap closed in early 2018. In early 2019, the firm moved its headquarters from California to Hong Kong. As of August 2021, Bankman-Fried owned approximately 90 percent of Alameda Research.
Sam Bankman-Fried started his own crypto exchange in April 2019 under the name FTX. Alameda Research played a significant role in the growth of FTX, as it acted as FTX's main market maker, available to buy and sell with other customers, sometimes taking trading losses to attract customers to the exchange. According to public data reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, between early 2021 and March 2022, Alameda Research amassed crypto tokens ahead of FTX listing them for trading, especially on the Ethereum blockchain, with a value of about $60 million.
The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, reported that Alameda Research suffered a series of losses in May and June 2022 which were covered by FTX lending the trading firm more than half of its customer's funds; FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly described this as a poor judgment call. Pantheri Asset Management made $10.7 million as a counterparty of Alameda. In August 2022, Alameda co-CEO Sam Trabucco resigned, and Caroline Ellison became the firm's sole CEO.
On 8 November 2022, following a liquidity crisis at FTX, a large cryptocurrency exchange, Binance and FTX signed a letter of intent for FTX to be acquired by Binance. The value of Alameda was affected, and was estimated to have dropped over 90 percent following the public disclosure of problems and the FTX acquisition deal. …
Activities and donations
As a quantitative trading firm specializing in cryptocurrencies, Alameda's strategies included arbitrage, market making, yield farming, and trading volatility. During the 2020 United States presidential election, Alameda gave $5 million to Future Forward USA, a liberal political action committee (PAC) in support of President Joe Biden. In 2022, Alameda reportedly donated $5 million to Guarding Against Pandemics, a PAC run by Sam Bankman-Fried's brother, Gabe. The company provided financial support to the Worldwide Online Olympiad Training program by the Art of Problem Solving.
From the Wikipedia article Alameda Research (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).