Sam Bankman-Fried was bad at crypto scams and League of Legends

Last week, crypto exchange FTX went from being valued at nearly $32 billion to filing for bankruptcy, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, went from being the crypto space’s sole ethical genius to just being a guy like the rest of us, albeit a . which lost both customers and investors a fortune. He was even a normie on League of Legends. Despite notorious plays while pitching major venture capital firms for $200 million investmentsa new investigation reveals that he was pretty crap at it too.

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To summarize: Bankman-Fried ran FTX. In just a few years, the crypto exchange went from nothing to plastering its name across all sorts of sporting events and magazine covers. It was considered super value because it charged customers fees to buy and bet on crypto, but also because Bankman-Fried was considered the next tech whiz to use FTX to launch a financial “super app” that would legitimize crypto .

One version of this is what he told venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, for one, during a meeting where he actually played League of Legends. Sequoia knew about this, went on to provide Bankman-Fried with over $200 million in funding, enjoyed League of Legends plays in a profile on its website, and then deleted it after FTX flatlined and Sequoia had to tell investors it was one of the holdouts in what appeared to be crypto’s latest Ponzi scheme.

Where did all the money go? No one knows for sure yet, but one place it definitely didn’t work was paying for Bankman-Fried’s League of Legends coaching. According to one investigation of Financial Times, he was apparently terrible at Riot Games’ MOBA, playing over 1,000 matches without hitting Platinum. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have ever left Bronze Tier II.

“There is no clear pattern here: as you would expect [sic] for a suitably low-ranked player, SBF maintained an average-to-poor win ratio with its top champions (plant lady Zyra, crossbow-wielding witch hunter Vayne, and Egyptian-inspired dog god Nasus)” Financial Times reports.

Bankman-Fried’s last known fight appears to be in September 2021, possibly not long after the now infamous Sequoia track. In it, he played Vayne, the monster hunter who has devoted his life to destroying the demon that killed her family. He got six kills and four assists, but died 11 times. A very relatable performance, but probably not one that inspires cosmic brain status.

But having its mediocre League record exposed is the least of Bankman-Fried’s worries at this point. Things have somehow only continued to get worse for him and the investors and clients he fleeced for billions. He was questioned by Bahamian police and the Manhattan US attorney’s office looking at him now. FTX may have been hacked over the weekend after $600 million just mysteriously drained from the stock exchange. And the balance which was shopped around to potential buyers and which has now become public after the start of bankruptcy makes absolutely no sense.

It appears to consist almost entirely of crypto that Bankman-Fried was personally involved in the creation of, in addition to hidden columns, unexplained entries, seemingly obscure numbers and typos. Worst of all, it doesn’t actually explain where all the money went. “It’s an Excel file full of howls of ghosts and screams of tortured souls,” wrote Matt Levine on Bloomberg. “If you look too long at the spreadsheet, you’ll go crazy.”