by Annie Massa
(Bloomberg) -- Before the world began to grasp the truth about Sam Bankman-Fried -- before the panic, the investigations and, at last, the brutal collapse -- an inkling of doom began to spread through his convoluted crypto empire.
All across FTX, the exchange that had transformed his mere initials into a symbol of a new kind of wealth and power, one question came up again and again: Where is SBF?
Bankman-Fried, current and former employees say, seemed to have disappeared. Then, without explanation, a department nearly missed October payroll. Something was wrong.
Just how wrong is only now becoming blazingly clear. On Friday, after one of the most harrowing weeks in the young, freewheeling world of cryptocurrencies, his digital-asset empire -- 130-plus entities in all -- spiraled into bankruptcy.
The scandal has shocked the crypto players who giddily celebrated Bankman-Fried as the J.P. Morgan of their times and left them grasping for parallels.
Is this crypto’s Lehman Brothers, a tale of unbridled risk? Or is it something darker: an Enron-style fiasco that could now expose rot and wrongdoing? Federal authorities are investigating just that.
As the Chapter 11 filings landed Friday morning, questions were piling up, including the big one: Will some 1 million FTX customers ever get their money back? Some traders sensed trouble long before and ran for the exits before everyone else. Big names in Silicon Valley who embraced Bankman-Fried seem certain to suffer humiliating losses.
By now many of the broad outlines are widely known. Bankman-Fried’s sinkhole of debt, blurred business interests and investigations into whether he misused customer funds.
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