Veteran Crypto Reporter Brady Dale Discusses New FTX Book

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Brady Dale is a crypto journalist and former CoinDesker with a book coming out on Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX. He said the book, SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy, published by Wiley, is as much a success story about decentralized finance, or DeFi the corner of the crypto economy that continued to lend, issue stablecoins and allowing users to trade tokens even as their centralized counterparts choke.

This article is excerpted from The Node newsletter, which will send out two daily editions during the Consensus 2023 conference featuring the biggest news from the event. You can sign up to receive the full newsletter here or sign up to attend or live stream Consensus 2023 here.

CoinDesk caught up with Dale at Consensus 2023 to discuss unknown details about the history of FTX, his thoughts on Crypto Shelling points, and why he thinks Dogecoin should rank alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as canonical chains of cryptos.

What’s one thing you could say about Sam Bankman-Fried or FTX that you can’t say about Google?

In my opinion, SBF isn’t as geeky or goofy as it makes it out to be. I described him as a swaggering geek in my book. Seems like he had enough charisma that his entire company was largely driven by his vision and that was true from the start, long before he commanded hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not something someone who doesn’t have the confidence to look people in the eye can pull off.

You said in many ways that your SBF book is as much about DeFi. Is it premature to say DeFi won, even after decentralized exchanges and decentralized lenders fared much better than centralized alternatives?

DeFi didn’t win, that’s for sure, but it’s okay and still good. That’s not to say it solves all the problems the world still needs to solve, but almost all of the centralized crypto lenders have gone bankrupt, and none of the top-tier DeFi lenders have gone bankrupt. “DeFi Summer” was pivotal to FTX’s history as this year’s wild comebacks brought Sam to the public eye and led him to take on a broader leadership role in the crypto world. The first time many of us really experienced him as a character in space was when he saved SushiSwap in August 2020.

Bloomberg’s Matt Levine said crypto will always be a place for people with trusted games to play. Is the industry waiting for another Sam Bankman-Fried?

There will be many more scammers, but there have always been scammers. You can argue that crypto has put steroids in the delusional side of capitalism, but you can also say that crypto is a microscope that exposes how delusional capitalism has always been. When I say “brands”, many people might think of Coke and Pepsi: two famous opposing brands that are basically the same product. And yet, these two distinct words are worth heaps of money. This kind of thing is everywhere. One could say that cryptography is less a new illusion than a means of dispelling illusions.

You have covered blockchain technology quite extensively. What do you think of the multi-channel model? Are there any significant differences between consensus algorithms, and do you think we’ve seen the last of the different types of blockchain architectures we can expect?

You’d be crazy to bet that innovation will stop.

A big idea underlying my reporting and this book is that crypto technology is really more of a Schelling point. That’s not the thing. The thing is, people unite around a shared set of ideas that are instantiated by a coin. This is why Ethereum can move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake and remain Ethereum. The security model doesn’t matter. What matters is which coins Ethereum users agree are actually ETH.

Last year, I used to say that the only two blockchains we knew really mattered were Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, however, I also put Dogecoin on this list. For me, Dogecoin is the chain that said: a story, a character, a concept can have value, and if a community buys this character and collaborates in a distributed way to make the idea bigger, the value of the concept will increase and thus his room will grow. Dogecoin really brought this home. It’s not just about DOGE, it’s about this whole notion of collaborating around a concept, and that’s why my bet is that Dogecoin will be the return of blockchains again and again, for some time to come .

In three words or less, what is your view of the US crypto industry?

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