Last week’s collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is sending aftershocks through the scientific community. An undergraduate physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who founded FTX and quickly became a billionaire, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried began to back philanthropic organizations that supported a wide variety of science-related causes, most designed to improve human well-being.
“It’s definitely a mess,” says Josh Morrison, who heads 1Day Sooner, a pandemic preparedness research and advocacy organization that received $375,000 from the Future Fund and the FTX Foundation. During the pandemic, 1DaySooner became known for advocating so-called human challenge trials, which deliberately infected volunteers with SARS-CoV-2 to test vaccines.
SecureBio’s co-founder, Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at MIT, says the nonprofit is avoiding use of its Future Fund grant money for now, except to pay the salaries of the three newly hired people. “We don’t think it is right that anyone should lose their jobs over a financial calamity totally unrelated to the excellent work they are doing,” Esvelt says.
FTX’s collapse was unthinkable just days earlier. The company, which serves as an online trading platform for cryptocurrency, had assets between $10 billion and $50 billion, according to bankruptcy documents. But it was brought to its knees by an old-style run on the bank, as investors tried to withdraw their money after doubts were raised about FTX’s financial health.
what part of 'coining currency' do you not understand in the prohibitions of it?
How hasn’t anyone been arrested?
No surprise, no sympathy. Crypto is a Ponzi scheme.
when public funding for science dries up, researchers are forced to get money from scam artists
Um... a scammer who transparently ran a pyramid scheme off a tulip bubble which so many of us saw from miles away... may only be sending 'shockwaves' among the cryptobros you hang out with... but not elsewhere 😂
Really? A master con artist has stumped the scientific community? FTX Just re-enforced two things: the internet is a lie. If it’s too good to be true, it is. If you got suckered I’m sorry. But investing is risk management not watch line go up.
Good. It is time the absurdity of this disreputable system of Ponzis was recognised by supposedly intelligent persons.