29-year-old crypto billionaire has Goldman, CME Group in his sights as exchange aims to overtake Coinbase

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Should Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon be shaking in his boots?

This is the feeling that could be gleaned from Sam Bankman-Fried who explains, in an interview with the Financial Times, that financial giants like Goldman Sachs GS, -1.04% and the exchange platform CME Group CME, -0.35% could be a future acquisition. targets for its relatively successful FTX crypto exchange.

Bankman-Fried told the FT in a recent interview that his exchange, considered by some to be one of the fastest growing digital platforms, wants to overtake Binance and Coinbase Global COIN, -4.70%, the n ° 1 and 2 most important. cryto platforms around the world.

So watch out for Goldman and CME.

If we are the biggest exchange, [buying Goldman Sachs and CME] is not at all out of the question, Bankman-Fried was quoted by the FT as saying.

There may be good reason for Bankman-Fried to be superbly ambitious.

The 29-year-old, a U.S. citizen but residing in Hong Kong, is said to be a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which claims a net worth of $ 8.7 billion, according to Forbes. Forbes says the majority of his wealth comes from his stake in FTX, which he launched a few years ago, as well as ownership of crypto tokens, like bitcoin BTCUSD, + 1.09% and Ether ETHUSD, + 2.85% on the Ethereum blockchain, for example. He also started Alameda Research, the quantitative crypto trading company he founded in 2017, which manages $ 2.5 billion.

Bankman-Fried is aiming for a valuation of $ 20 billion for FTX in its last round, according to the FT. FTX, a cryptocurrency unicorn that offers derivatives trading services with offices in Hong Kong and the United States, is the world’s fourth largest crypto exchange, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

Even still, Goldman is worth $ 127 billion, while CME Groups is $ 75 billion, as of noon Wednesday.

Coinbase, meanwhile, has a market cap of around $ 50 billion, if Bankman-Fried considered looking down. Coinbase went public in April, but has had a tough road as a publicly traded company so far.

Coinbase shares have fallen 28% over the past three months, outperforming Bitcoin, which has fallen 48% over the same period. However, traditional assets have been doing much better than their turbulent crypto counterparts in recent months, by comparison.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, + 0.07% envisages a gain of more than 3% over the three-month period, the S&P 500 SPX index, + 0.17% and the Nasdaq Composite COMP, + 0.12% the indices are both up nearly 6% over the same period.

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