City profiles

Sam Bankman-Fried

The 30-year-old founder of the FTX exchange, one of the most youthful cryptobillionaires, is now playing a pivotal role in the “cryptowinter,” said the FT. Sam Bankman-Fried has emerged as “a lender of last resort” to an industry now suffering its own “credit crisis”. In the past fortnight, he has “extended loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars to troubled blockchain outfits including BlockFi and crypto-lender Voyager” – to “steady” them and “boost confidence in the system”, preventing more dominoes from falling. Bankman-Fried’s influence extends far beyond digital assets, said The Verge. He was reported this week to be mulling a buyout of the stock-trading and investment app Robinhood, which has lost some 75% of its value since floating last year.

Changpeng Zhao

The founder of Binance – the world’s largest crypto exchange – admits that a phrase he often overuses is: “Who is responsible for this? Who?” Having seen much of his multibillion-dollar fortune evaporate, one imagines that CZ (“See-Zee”), as he is known, has been asking the question often recently. Changpeng Zhao, 45, was born in China and raised in Canada. He was introduced to bitcoin at a poker game in 2013 and founded Binance four years later, said The Observer. Since then, Binance has repeatedly been in the cross hairs of regulators. A recent Reuters report alleged it had served as a conduit for laundering $2.35bn in illicit funds. “When it’s all over, Zhao could wind up under criminal indictment,” said Bloomberg. “Or he could be the richest man in the world.”