Why we should pray for crypto’s survival

Note to self: don’t sound smug about the sudden collapse of FTX – the Bahamas-based crypto exchange whose valuation has been zapped from $32 billion to zero – because however much it plays to I-told-you-so instincts about the mug’s game of crypto, the episode may herald a wave of wealth destruction that’s the last thing the financial world needs when there’s already so much bad stuff going on.

Still, smugness is a strong temptation here – and what could be more provoking of that sentiment than a photograph in the Daily Telegraph of Sir Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on an FTX-badged stage alongside the firm’s 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried in his shorts and scruffy trainers? This is a complex emerging scandal in which large sums of FTX client funds may have been mis-appropriated, allegedly to fund high-risk bets by Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s trading business that ran alongside FTX. But it’s also a plain parable of money talking: how a crypto brat who banged on about ‘effective altruism’ and gave millions to Democrat campaign funds could buy himself the status of a wunderkind guru.