0:00

Everything's better without ads. Wondery

0:02

Plus subscribers can listen to Spellcaster,

0:05

The Fall of Sam Bankman Freed, early

0:07

and ad-free. Find Wondery Plus in

0:09

the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

0:19

When Caroline Ellison walked into

0:21

the Jumpin' Java coffee shop in Berkeley,

0:24

she was hoping to get some friendly advice

0:26

from an old colleague. I asked him if

0:28

he wanted to get coffee and he canceled

0:30

a few times. Caroline told this

0:33

origin story to the FTX podcast

0:35

years later. In truth, Caroline

0:38

was in a really raw moment

0:40

in her life. It was February 2018.

0:43

She'd been at Jane

0:45

Street for over a year, but she wasn't

0:47

happy. On top of that, she

0:49

was going through a bad breakup. She

0:52

wrote about some of it on a blog she occasionally

0:54

posted on under the self-deprecating

0:56

name Fake Charity Nerd Girl.

0:59

I don't know what happiness and life satisfaction

1:02

are or if they're real things or if

1:04

they have anything to do with what people answer

1:06

to survey questions or which one,

1:09

if either, actually matters. Maybe

1:11

she was hoping Sam could help.

1:14

But when Sam arrived and sat down

1:16

across from her, he seemed distant,

1:20

maybe distracted. And I

1:22

was like, oh, so like, what are you up

1:24

to? And he was like, oh, I can't tell you. After

1:28

some back and forth, Caroline pulled it out

1:30

of him. I was like, no, it's OK. Like, don't,

1:32

you don't need to tell me anything

1:33

you're not comfortable with. If you're

1:35

like, you have some kind of like secret thing going on, that's fine. He

1:38

was like, no, OK, I'll tell you about it. Sam

1:40

had found something incredible, a way to

1:42

make millions of dollars a day.

1:47

And risky. But he was doing

1:49

what they had both talked about doing, earning

1:52

a lot of money with the eventual

1:54

goal of giving it all away. What's

1:57

more, he was doing it with a bunch of

1:59

people who believed in him. believed

2:00

in the same thing,

2:02

and he wanted Caroline to join them. It

2:05

probably sounded like just the kind of thing

2:07

Caroline was looking for. There

2:09

was one complication, as Caroline

2:11

told me in our interview. It was kind of like a very

2:14

crazy time. Everything was kind of

2:16

like in chaos. Caroline would come

2:18

to realize Sam had big plans

2:20

for his new company. There was

2:22

a lot of money to be made, and

2:25

he wasn't about to let anything or

2:27

anyone get in his way.

2:36

Whether you're running errands, on your daily commute,

2:39

or even at home, you can enjoy all your audio

2:41

entertainment in one app, the Audible app.

2:43

As an Audible member, you can choose one title a month

2:45

to keep from the entire catalog. This includes

2:47

the latest bestsellers and new releases. Plus

2:49

get full access to a growing selection of included

2:52

audiobooks, Audible originals, and more.

2:55

If you've been wanting to form good habits, break bad ones, and

2:57

improve motivation, Atomic Habits written

2:59

and narrated by James Clear is a great listen.

3:01

It'll reshape your mindset on progress and success

3:04

by helping you develop strategies to transform

3:06

your habits.

3:06

New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit

3:09

audible.com slash wonderipod or text

3:11

wonderipod to 500-500 to try Audible for free for 30

3:14

days. That's W-O-N-D-E-R-Y-P-O-D. Audible.com

3:18

slash wonderipod or text wonderipod to

3:21

500-500 to try Audible for free for 30

3:23

days. Angie's list is now Angie,

3:25

and we've heard a lot of theories about why. I

3:28

thought it was an eco move. For your words, less

3:30

paper. No, it was so you could say

3:32

it faster. No, it's to

3:35

be more iconic. Must be a tech

3:37

thing. But those aren't quite right. It's

3:39

because now you can compare upfront prices,

3:41

book a service instantly, and even get your project

3:44

handled from start to finish. Sounds easy.

3:46

It is, and it makes us so much more than

3:48

just a list. Get started at Angie.com.

3:51

That's A-N-G-I, or download the app today.

3:58

From Wondery and Bloomberg. I'm

4:00

Hannah Miller, and this is

4:02

Spellcaster, the fall of Sam

4:05

Bankman-Fried. This

4:07

is episode three, deleted

4:09

from reality. ["What

4:10

Do You Start For?" by Sam Bankman-Fried

4:13

plays in the background.]

4:19

Sam Bankman-Fried

4:22

sat at his desk, staring at a bank

4:24

of computer monitors. It

4:26

was Christmas Day 2017, and

4:28

Sam's new company was buzzing. Alameda

4:32

Research looked like some combination

4:34

of an artist's squat and a war room. Twenty

4:37

people were tapping away in front of their

4:39

six-screen workstations. Bean

4:42

bags everywhere.

4:43

Beyond burgers for sustenance.

4:46

Low ceilings, fluorescent lights. Millions

4:49

of dollars in crypto were pinging

4:51

through their accounts all over

4:53

the world. And then...

4:57

all the screens went black. We

5:00

were drawing so much power because everyone had

5:02

six monitors, and we had these really powerful

5:05

computers, so we blew a fuse.

5:08

Naya Buskow was working in the

5:10

Berkeley office when the lights went out.

5:13

At a normal company, someone might have looked

5:15

for the fuse box or immediately called

5:17

the landlord, or maybe even gone

5:19

home and

5:20

enjoyed Christmas. We had to keep

5:22

trading because we couldn't stop trading.

5:25

So we plugged everything into a different

5:27

outlet that worked, and we blew that fuse, too. So

5:30

then we ran extension cords to the bathroom

5:33

and blew that fuse, too.

5:34

Eventually, she says, they gave

5:36

up and called the building manager. The

5:39

landlord flipped and

5:41

was kind of screaming about fire risks and blah,

5:43

blah, blah, which is pretty reasonable, to

5:45

be fair.

5:46

It was all down to Sam. He

5:49

couldn't bear to stop trading. He cared a

5:51

lot about this idea that there would

5:53

be this really good trade that we would miss out

5:55

on. Risking making

5:58

a bad trade, that was...

5:59

less clearly motivating to it. Alameda

6:02

was only a few months old at this point. Sam's

6:05

efforts to get a new company off the ground had

6:07

been boosted by his influential co-founder.

6:10

She was a brown-haired Australian in her 20s

6:12

who had switched careers from being a pharmacist

6:15

to running nonprofits and

6:17

who shared Sam's interest in effective

6:19

altruism.

6:20

Please welcome Tara McCoy. Today

6:22

I want to talk about the ecosystem

6:24

of EA and how you can identify

6:27

allies and find the niche within the

6:29

community that best suits your skills and

6:31

expertise and the things that you care about most. Tara

6:34

wasn't just any effective altruist.

6:37

She was the CEO of the Center

6:39

for Effective Altruism.

6:41

This is her giving the sales pitch a few years

6:43

earlier on stage at an EA event. We

6:46

are attracted to this community because we share these

6:48

same core values, the same set of three

6:50

things. So first step is identify

6:53

our allies. Identify it. Does

6:55

this person I'm talking to share these three core

6:57

values or which of them do they which

6:59

of them do they share and which of them

7:02

is not really their cup of tea. And then think

7:04

about what role do you play. What role

7:06

do they play and how can you cooperate together

7:08

to create more value. Luckily

7:11

effective

7:11

altruism was definitely

7:13

Sam's cup of tea. Together

7:16

they convinced some of the wealthiest EA

7:18

followers to lend tens of millions

7:20

of dollars. People like Yann Tallin,

7:23

the billionaire co-founder of Skype. By

7:25

the way, Yann told me the loan was his only

7:28

connection to Alameda and Sam. In

7:31

his previous job at Jane Street, Sam

7:33

had been working to make profits based

7:36

on tiny price differences.

7:38

Now he was trying to do the same with

7:40

crypto where some of the price differences

7:43

were huge. His first

7:45

really big trade was in Japan. At

7:48

the time, the price of a Bitcoin in Japan

7:51

was higher than the price in the US. Way

7:54

higher. If someone like

7:56

Sam could find a way they

7:58

could buy Bitcoin in the US.

9:59

on one of his first media tours.

10:02

He told the BlockWorks Empire podcast

10:04

how he had tried to explain to Japanese banks

10:06

what he was going to use the account for. And

10:09

then you're like, all right, can we send this to the US? So like,

10:11

what are we doing with it? And you're like, oh,

10:13

it's crypto trading, so like,

10:15

can you repeat that? Sam told them he

10:17

would be wiring millions of dollars

10:19

from Tokyo to the US every

10:21

day in order to buy Bitcoin in the US

10:24

and sell it there.

10:25

The Japanese bank couldn't compute. It's

10:28

like, this is sketchy as fucking than I've ever seen.

10:31

In order to get a banking license, you have to take

10:33

a test, and it's like, if someone does exactly this,

10:36

what are they doing? And you circle money laundering. Sam

10:38

sounded proud of how close to the edge

10:40

they were. That was a running joke

10:43

in the office. Naya remembers a

10:45

slack thread that Alameda employees

10:47

used to store information for the company's accounts

10:50

on crypto exchanges.

10:51

It was called identity theft.

10:55

Sam and Alameda were making money,

10:58

but it came at a cost. It

11:00

was very stressful. We wanted 24-7 trading

11:02

coverage, so people had

11:05

changing shifts, you know, night shifts some days and

11:07

day shifts other days. People

11:10

were working very, very long hours.

11:11

Money was moving in and out of Alameda

11:14

accounts so quickly that nobody

11:16

knew which trades were profitable and

11:18

which weren't.

11:20

Nobody made sure that the money actually

11:22

arrived

11:22

where it was supposed to go. We didn't have accurate

11:24

data about all of our transfers or our balances

11:27

even. While the Japan trade was working,

11:29

none of this mattered. But then,

11:31

crypto markets crashed and the mistakes

11:34

became hard to ignore. Mistakes

11:36

like Sam's decision to bet all of one donor's

11:39

money on the price of the cryptocurrency

11:41

Ethereum.

11:42

Which went very poorly

11:44

and lost us millions of dollars.

11:45

Or the massive transfer of another

11:48

crypto token that nobody bothered

11:50

to check on. By the time they realized

11:52

that the transfer hadn't made it to the correct

11:54

destination, the price of the token

11:57

had collapsed. So we lost,

11:58

I want to say, three.

14:00

It would have been the perfect time for other

14:02

owners to step in. Except

14:05

Sam

14:05

had registered himself as the sole

14:07

owner. The whole thing might

14:10

not have felt out of place at one of Sam's diplomacy

14:12

games back at MIT. He

14:14

had outmaneuvered them. There

14:17

was nothing they could do. Tara

14:20

McAuley and the rest of the management team

14:22

resigned, along with Naya and half

14:24

of Alameda's

14:25

two dozen staff. When he said no,

14:27

I was like, great, it's his problem.

14:30

It's not our problem anymore. Because

14:32

yeah, things had just gotten to be such a mess. And

14:35

we had lost back most of

14:37

the profits that we had made.

14:39

When Tara and the rest of the team left,

14:42

a lot of the investors from the EA movement

14:44

followed suit. Sam spun

14:47

the revolt as a good thing. In a long

14:49

memo he sent to some investors, he

14:51

took partial responsibility for what had

14:54

blaming sloppy trading, bad luck,

14:56

and his own lack of sleep. He

14:58

declared that the new Alameda, purged

15:01

of his detractors, was fixed. And

15:04

Sam did have a lot going for him. He

15:07

still had a big chunk of EA funding,

15:09

but he needed new allies. He

15:11

already had one, a promising

15:13

young trader from Jean Street. His

15:16

old friend,

15:17

Caroline Ellison.

15:28

Have you ever been to therapy and felt like you

15:30

just weren't connecting with your therapist? It

15:32

happens. What's important is what you

15:34

do next. I'm Dr. Doug Newton,

15:36

Chief Medical Officer at Sondermein, an in-person

15:39

and virtual provider of mental health care. At

15:42

Sondermein we connect you with the clinician

15:44

that's right for you. And my team provides

15:46

professional guidance to ensure that you

15:48

receive the best possible care. Therapy

15:51

is hard. Being the right therapist shouldn't

15:53

be. Visit Sondermein.com

15:55

and schedule a session in less than 10 minutes. Therapy

15:58

works. A

16:08

few weeks after Caroline met Sam at the

16:10

coffee shop, she handed in her

16:13

resignation at Jane Street. She'd

16:15

been there for less than two years, but she was

16:17

ready for a change. She wrote

16:19

about it on her Tumblr. It's kind of weird

16:22

how differently people react to you saying

16:24

that you broke up with someone versus you

16:26

saying that you quit your job when from

16:28

the inside they feel really similar?

16:31

With the job,

16:32

people will say, yay, congrats,

16:34

good for you, so exciting, even

16:36

if they know your job was amazing and

16:38

a really good fit for you. With

16:41

the breakup, people will say, oh no,

16:43

I'm so sorry, are you okay?

16:46

Even if they know the relationship

16:48

was really not good for you and

16:50

needed to end like yesterday.

16:53

Anyway, I have done both of these things

16:55

in the past few weeks and experienced approximately

16:58

the same mix of emotions in both situations.

17:01

Caroline was taking a risk, but

17:04

after getting that coffee with Sam, she'd

17:06

realized she didn't want to be a normie on

17:08

Wall Street. Sam's startup

17:10

Alameda seemed like the kind of place where

17:12

she could really make her mark, so

17:14

she packed up her belongings in New York and

17:17

moved to the Bay Area. She

17:19

had a lot to learn. I mean, I'd heard

17:21

about Bitcoin in the news like anyone else, but

17:23

that's about it. Even though she'd later say

17:26

she thought crypto was mostly scams

17:28

and memes when you get down to it, the

17:31

idea of making tons of money,

17:33

money that could be given away to charity,

17:36

was undeniable. I

17:37

mean, he was telling me about the arts

17:40

they were doing and how much money they were making

17:42

from them, and I was like, oh my God. What Caroline

17:44

couldn't have known was that she was basically

17:47

walking into a complete and utter

17:49

disaster. Half the company was

17:51

marching out the door, and Sam was scrambling

17:53

to keep investors from pulling out their money. I

17:56

didn't start until Alameda had

17:58

been around for like four months or something. that, which

18:01

feels like not a very long time

18:03

looking back now, but it felt like an eternity of

18:05

time. Caroline was one of the more

18:07

experienced traders there, even

18:10

though she was only 23.

18:12

She settled into her job making those

18:14

trades in the middle of the night.

18:16

And despite the crisis unfolding around

18:18

her,

18:19

she seemed to be enjoying her new chapter.

18:22

I moved to New York expecting my life to

18:24

be a cross between Gossip Girl and

18:26

Sex and the City, and that basically

18:29

didn't pan out. I moved to

18:31

California expecting my life to be

18:33

a cross between Silicon Valley and

18:35

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and let me

18:37

tell you, that has actually been quite

18:39

accurate. She seemed electrified

18:42

by the novelty of her new existence. She

18:45

blogged about getting catcalled in Berkeley,

18:47

something she hadn't experienced in New York,

18:50

and she was exploring other new

18:52

things. Me after living in New York for

18:54

years. Remember when I used to be super

18:56

triggered by the existence of polyamory?

18:59

What a weird phase in my life. Me

19:01

after living in the Bay Area for a week. Monogamy

19:04

is hopeless and dying. Might as well be

19:06

a plate for alpha guys while I'm still

19:08

young, hot enough, and freeze my eggs

19:11

for later. Her love life was taking

19:13

off.

19:14

A few months after she started at Alameda,

19:16

Caroline brought Sam to meet my friend, the

19:19

one who had the bachelorette party. We

19:21

don't know exactly when Caroline got

19:23

involved romantically with her boss,

19:26

but it seemed like Sam ticked at least

19:28

some of the boxes she had on a list

19:30

of cute boy things on her blog.

19:33

Things like low-risk aversion.

19:35

She also put controlling most major world

19:38

governments, spatial reasoning abilities,

19:40

and sufficient strength to physically overpower

19:42

you.

19:43

But just as Caroline was getting comfortable

19:45

in California, Sam changed

19:48

things. Again. Sam after

19:50

having been at Alameda for

19:52

a year and never taken a day off work was

19:55

like, I think it's finally time to

19:57

leave. I'm going

19:58

to go to a conference in 8- I'll

20:01

be gone for a week, like, pull down the

20:03

fort until I get back. And

20:06

then didn't come back for like six months. And

20:08

he had an announcement. He was moving

20:11

the company's headquarters to

20:13

Hong Kong.

20:16

A few days after Thanksgiving 2018,

20:20

Sam walked into a classy bar on the

20:22

top floor of a five-star hotel

20:24

in Hong Kong.

20:25

He was wearing his classic t-shirt

20:27

cargo pants thing. And he was like 20 or 30

20:29

minutes late. He apologized. He didn't really understand

20:32

how to call cabs in Hong Kong yet.

20:34

Alex Pack wore a sports jacket.

20:36

Hair combed.

20:38

Beard trimmed.

20:39

He was a crypto venture capitalist on

20:41

the lookout for promising founders and

20:44

companies.

20:45

He'd been investing in crypto startups for

20:47

about five years at this point,

20:49

an eternity in the industry. I was

20:51

sort of the white Western

20:53

guy that had really enmeshed

20:56

myself in Asia crypto in

20:58

particular.

20:59

For Alex, it made sense for Sam

21:01

to be in Hong Kong at that time. Crypto

21:04

was exploding in Asia. There

21:07

was far less regulation than in the U.S.

21:10

It meant it was far easier for a company

21:12

like Sam's to operate.

21:14

But there was another reason Sam

21:16

was meeting Alex. He needed money.

21:19

When some of his old effective altruists investors

21:22

had pulled out, it had slowed

21:24

Sam down. But Sam didn't want

21:26

to slow down. He wanted to get big.

21:29

Fast. Sam basically

21:31

seemed like an energetic robot, I

21:33

would say. He was very excited, very

21:35

eager. He wanted to conquer the world. Alex

21:38

was impressed. And not just by Sam's

21:40

drive.

21:41

Lots of people who come out of MIT

21:44

and Wall Street are driven.

21:46

There was something unusual

21:49

about him. sort

22:00

of weirdos, like unique people,

22:03

because it's very hard to start a company. Everyone

22:06

is telling you, no, you can't do it and

22:08

you're not going to succeed. Alex asked

22:10

Sam how much money he needed to grow the

22:12

company,

22:13

and Sam had a ready answer.

22:15

Five million.

22:17

Alex was in. He said his

22:19

firm could put in at least half of that,

22:22

making him the lead investor in

22:24

Alameda.

22:26

But there was a condition to release the funds.

22:29

Alex said his firm would need to do some

22:32

standard due diligence. We have to

22:34

do formal stuff. We need to look at

22:36

your financials and we need to do a few customer

22:38

calls and meet some of the rest of your team

22:40

and do an office visit. But assuming all

22:42

goes well, we'll invest. And

22:45

nine times out of ten, that leads

22:47

to an investment. No big deal,

22:50

in other words. Alex guessed this

22:52

would take a few weeks, maybe a month or

22:54

two tops. Things were looking good.

22:57

Then it all started to change. Sam

23:01

had been cooperative before, but

23:03

now would only provide incomplete

23:05

answers to basic questions, prompting

23:07

more questions, more odd answers.

23:10

This went on for months.

23:13

It ended up being like

23:16

peeling off layers of an onion, you

23:18

know, where you

23:21

peel some off, you think you're at the bottom, and it

23:23

keeps going and it keeps going.

23:24

Alex found out about the losses, the

23:27

employee revolt, and he was still

23:29

okay about taking a risk on Sam.

23:32

But then he started learning other stuff.

23:35

Sam told Alex that after the revolt, he'd

23:37

met with some of the effective altruists who had decided

23:40

to stay with him.

23:40

And they said, hey, Sam, like, you know,

23:43

we're going to keep money in with you, but you

23:45

have to promise to like be more careful. Like,

23:48

don't grow so quickly that serious

23:51

mistakes happen again.

23:52

Huh, Alex thought. So

23:55

how would they feel about this venture capital

23:57

deal?

23:58

VC investors...

23:59

are all about growth. Would

24:02

Sam's EA investors be okay with

24:04

it? And Sam said, yeah, you know, I thought about

24:06

that, actually. And

24:09

I think there's probably a way we could structure

24:11

the deal with you, where we just don't

24:13

have to tell them about it. And they just

24:15

don't have to know. At first,

24:17

we're like, Oh, okay, that's, you know, clever structuring.

24:20

And then you think about it for a minute. And you're like, wait, these are,

24:23

these guys are like Sam's earliest backers,

24:25

they trusted him when he had nothing when he didn't even

24:27

have a trading track record. And

24:30

he's telling us just very casually

24:32

that he's gonna figure out some way to, you

24:34

know, basically lie to them.

24:36

So, you know, if he's doing this to his earliest backers,

24:38

what's he gonna do to us down the road?

24:40

By this point, Alex was starting

24:42

to wonder about Sam.

24:44

But the business seemed to be doing well.

24:46

The numbers they were sending looked good.

24:49

They kept talking about closing a deal.

24:52

They were managing maybe 10s of millions

24:54

of dollars. And they were making

24:57

in the 10s of percent, you know, like

24:59

maybe 30, 40, 50% annualized

25:02

returns, which is incredible. That's

25:04

like what a James Street does as

25:07

well.

25:07

Then

25:08

in the spring of 2019,

25:10

Alex noticed the numbers change.

25:13

Alameda lost money on a string

25:15

of trades just for a few

25:17

weeks. But it was enough for Alex

25:19

to ask, what's up? He tells

25:21

us very casually, he

25:24

says, Oh, I think maybe I forgot to tell you, but

25:26

me and some

25:29

of the the senior executives at

25:31

Alameda, we recently came

25:33

up with his idea of doing a crypto exchange.

25:36

And that's why we're losing

25:38

money in Alameda, because we sort

25:40

of let these algorithms run on autopilot.

25:43

And you know, if more of my time was spent

25:45

focusing on Alameda trading, then

25:47

less on the exchange, then it probably

25:50

wouldn't be doing so poorly. But I

25:52

just think it's a better use of my time.

25:54

They said, Yeah, like all these exchanges

25:56

are making a ton of money. It's a great business. And

25:59

they're just so bad.

25:59

They don't have any tooling for institutions

26:02

or professional traders like us. So

26:04

maybe there's an opening in the market here.

26:06

He was going to call it FTX. Sudden

26:10

changes in direction are common in startups.

26:14

Instagram was the result of a pivot.

26:15

So was Twitter.

26:17

So was Netflix. So Alex

26:19

said, sure, go for it. Pivot

26:22

away. And Sam responds, sort

26:25

of confused. He says, oh,

26:27

maybe you don't understand, but FTX

26:30

is a separate business. Meaning

26:32

Sam planned to keep FTX all

26:35

for himself. He was asking

26:37

Alex to invest $5 million in

26:39

Alameda,

26:40

which Sam would use to hire employees

26:43

who would build both Alameda and

26:45

FTX. But he didn't want to

26:47

share

26:47

FTX. And so I told Sam this. I

26:49

said, hey, this is a serious conflict of interest

26:51

you're proposing. Like, you want to take our

26:53

money that

26:55

is going into Alameda.

26:57

You want to use that to pay

26:59

your salary, your team's salary, which

27:02

majority of that is going to be going into the development

27:04

of this exchange that you're incubating. Don't

27:06

you see, Sam, how that is problematic

27:09

and is just something that we can never agree

27:11

to? And that was

27:13

it. Alex walked away from the deal.

27:16

Sam though didn't slow down.

27:19

He was still looking for investors for his new

27:21

project. Eventually,

27:24

he wound up meeting with another crypto exchange,

27:26

Binance. Sam is very

27:29

presentable, very smart, have

27:32

a very strong track record as a

27:34

top trader.

27:35

Bill Chen is a crypto investor who used

27:37

to work at Binance. And he sold

27:39

a story about, OK, so Binance

27:42

is a sort of a conglomerate.

27:44

But I am going to launch

27:46

a derivative focus exchange.

27:49

Listening to this was the CEO of

27:51

Binance, Cheng Peng Zhao. CZ,

27:55

as he's known, was 15 years older than

27:57

Sam and in many ways the total

27:59

opposite.

31:59

by me, Hannah Miller. The

32:02

lead writer is Max Tafkin. Lead

32:04

reporter is Annie Masa. Producer

32:06

is Chris Siegel.

32:07

Senior producer is Russell Finch. Senior

32:10

editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Bloomberg's

32:13

senior editors

32:13

are Jeff Grocotte and Mark Milian. Additional

32:16

production assistance by Kristi Taiwamekanjula,

32:19

Evangeline Barros, and Mariah Dennis.

32:22

Fact checking by Will Tavlin. Senior

32:24

managing producer is Lutta Pandia.

32:27

Managing producer is Olivia Weber, and coordinating

32:30

producer is Heather Beloga. Music

32:32

supervisor is Scott Velasquez

32:34

for Freezon Sync. Sound design

32:36

and mixing by Jamie Cooper. Bloomberg's

32:38

head of crypto news is Stacy Marie Ishmael.

32:41

Executive producers are Sage Bauman,

32:43

Katie Boyce, and Jared Sandberg for Bloomberg.

32:46

Executive producers are George Lavender,

32:49

Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent

32:50

for Wondery.