Aditiya Baradwaj joined crypto-trading firm Alameda Research when it was run out of an anonymous first-floor office in downtown Berkeley, California. It was September 2021, and the day Baradwaj arrived, Sam Bankman-Fried, the company’s founder, was sitting in the middle of the trading floor playing League of Legends. By then, Bankman-Fried was already more than a crypto billionaire. Alameda was a whale in crypto markets; FTX, the exchange Bankman-Fried had started in 2019, had more than a million customers. FTX’s latest funding round, in July 2021, had raised nearly $1 billion from A-list investors that included Sequoia and SoftBank.
Bankman-Fried was an unlikely poster boy for the industry: mop-haired, academic,
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