How bitcoin bounced back after FTX

One of the major exchanges has gone spectacularly bust. Billions of investor’s money has been lost. There have been allegations of widespread fraud, and one of the biggest corporate trials in modern history is set to dominate the business pages over the rest of the year. The collapse of the FTX, and the arrest of its high-profile founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was meant to finish off bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrencies. And yet, this year digital money is staging a dramatic revival – and making fools of its critics all over again. 

When FTX went down, there was no shortage of people telling us, with ill-disguised glee, that bitcoin was finished. The lurid tales of partner-swapping millennials trading billions in a Bahamas penthouse, while under the cover of ‘effective altruism’, certainly made for gripping reading. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s right-hand man, argued it proved that crypto was a ‘demented’ enterprise that ‘was rife with fraud’, while the European Union, somewhat predictably, decided that it was evidence more EU regulation was needed.