2022 was a rough year for crypto filled to the brim with failing prices and fraudulent companies. All in all, however, Michael Saylor – the previous head of MicroStrategy – feels everything that’s happened ultimately pushed the space forward in many ways. Michael Saylor on FTX: It Helped Crypto One of the big things that Saylor brought up was the collapse of FTX, which occurred in November of 2022. After several years of being the golden child of the industry and basically making its way up the ladder into the category of top five crypto exchanges, its founder Sam Bankman-Fried complained of a liquidity crunch online and said his firm needed money fast to stay afloat. From there, he approached his larger competitor Binance about a potential buyout, though things
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2022 was a rough year for crypto filled to the brim with failing prices and fraudulent companies. All in all, however, Michael Saylor – the previous head of MicroStrategy – feels everything that’s happened ultimately pushed the space forward in many ways.
Michael Saylor on FTX: It Helped Crypto
One of the big things that Saylor brought up was the collapse of FTX, which occurred in November of 2022. After several years of being the golden child of the industry and basically making its way up the ladder into the category of top five crypto exchanges, its founder Sam Bankman-Fried complained of a liquidity crunch online and said his firm needed money fast to stay afloat.
From there, he approached his larger competitor Binance about a potential buyout, though things didn’t work out this way, and his company eventually had to file bankruptcy. This would have been bad in and of itself, but more details about the firm’s accounting processes eventually made it to light, and it was alleged that SBF had used customer funds to purchase Bahamian luxury real estate and pay off loans taken out by his other company Alameda Research.
Today, SBF is awaiting trial at his parents’ house in California and has been charged with several counts of fraud. Under normal circumstances, an incident like this would have had massive repercussions, but Saylor thinks the situation has helped crypto in the long run by shedding more light on illicit players. In an interview, he stated:
The crypto meltdown was painful in the short term, but it’s necessary over the long term for the industry to grow up… This industry has some good ideas like digital currencies and assets moving at the speed of light that are unstoppable and a digital commodity that can’t be debased. It also has a lot of entrepreneurs that implemented those good ideas in an irresponsible fashion.
Like many of his constituents, Saylor is now calling for clear regulation in the space to prevent situations like this from ever happening again and to keep investors safe and protected. He said:
What [crypto] needs is adult supervision. It needs the Goldman Sachs’ and the Morgan Stanley’s and the BlackRock’s to come in the industry. It needs clear guidelines from Congress. It needs clear rules of the road from the SEC.
A Long History with BTC
Saylor has long been a crypto and bitcoin bull. As the former CEO of MicroStrategy (he now serves as the executive chairman), he first began purchasing BTC and adding it to his company’s balance sheet in August of 2020. From there, he continued with his trades and by the end of 2021, he had amassed a fortune of close to $5 billion if not more.
Sadly, since then, the space has fallen into a whirlwind and his firm owes billions.