Veteran Crypto reporter Brady Dale discusses new FTX book

Brady Dale is a crypto journalist and former CoinDesker with a book coming out about 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 of decentralized finance, or DeFi – the corner of the crypto economy that continued to lend, issue stablecoins and enable for users to exchange tokens even when their centralized counterparts choke.

This article is excerpted from The Node newsletter, which will send two issues daily during the Consensus 2023 conference with the biggest news from the event. You can subscribe to get the whole newsletter here or register to participate or live stream Consensus 2023 here.

CoinDesk caught up with Dale during Consensus 2023 to discuss unknown details of the FTX story, his thoughts on crypto “Shelling points” and why he believes Dogecoin should rank alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum as crypto’s canonical chains.

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

It’s very much my opinion that SBF is nowhere near as nerdy or awkward as he’s been made out to be. I described him as a geek with swagger in my book. It sounds like he had enough charisma that his entire company was largely driven by his vision, and that was true from the very beginning, long before he commanded hundreds of millions of dollars. It is not something a person without the confidence to look people in the eye can achieve.

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

DeFi hasn’t won, sure, but that’s okay and it remains fine. That’s not to say it solves all the problems the world needs it to solve yet, but almost all of the centralized crypto lenders went under, and none of the DeFi lenders went under. “DeFi Summer” was pivotal to the FTX story because the wild returns that year brought Sam into the public eye and led him to take a broader leadership role in the crypto world. The first time many of us really experienced him as a character in the space came when he saved SushiSwap in August 2020.

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

There will be many more scammers, but there have always been scammers. You could argue that crypto put steroids into the illusory side of capitalism, but you could also say that crypto is a microscope that reveals how illusory capitalism has always been. When I say “brands”, many may think of Coke and Pepsi: two well-known competing brands that are basically the same product. And yet somehow these two separate words are worth heaps of money. This is found everywhere. One could argue that crypto is less a new illusion and more a way to dispel illusions.

You have covered blockchain technology quite extensively. What do you think of the multi-chain model? Are there meaningful 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 ever bet that innovation will stop.

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

Last year I used to say that the only two blockchains we really knew were important were Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, however, I’ve put Dogecoin on that list as well. To me, Dogecoin is the chain that said: A story, a character, a concept can have value, and if a community buys into that character and collaborates in a distributed way to make the idea bigger, the value of the concept will grow. and so the coin will grow. Dogecoin really brought it home. It’s not just about DOGE, it’s about the whole idea of ​​collaborating around a concept, and that’s why my bet is that Dogecoin will be the comeback child of blockchains again and again, for some time to come.

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