Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra were joined by Laura Shin, CEO of the show, to chop it up about the collapse of FTX. 

Show topics:

  • Haseeb’s explanation of the blowup of FTX
  • whether FTX was a Ponzi scheme
  • Sam Bankman-Fried’s strategy to become a billionaire
  • the weird sale of Serum, a project backed by SBF
  • the lack of proper accounting practices in FTX and Alameda
  • whether FTX did not have a proper and large enough security team 
  • the likelihood that FTX’s volume numbers are fake 
  • why Haseeb thinks this is one of the biggest catastrophes in venture history
  • the role of media in building SBF’s character and the revindication of journalism
  • whether venture capital firms run propaganda for their portfolio companies
  • whether VC culture enabled this collapse to happen
  • the story of how Sam convinced Tom Brady to invest in FTX
  • the debate about effective altruism and whether SBF’s EA caused his mistakes
  • whether FTX’s failure will set the crypto industry back

 

Hosts

Guests

Previous coverage of Unchained:

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