Ryan Salame (born 1992or1993 [1] ) is an American business executive who operated an illegal money-transmitting business. He was the CEO of FTX Digital Markets, the FTX subsidiary based in the Bahamas. He was the founder of the American Dream Federal Action super PAC. [2]
Salame grew up in Sandisfield, Massachusetts. [3] He attended high school at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington. [4] He received a BBA (bachelors in business administration) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2015. [5] He received a Masters in Finance from Georgetown University in 2019. [6] [2]
Salame worked briefly for Ernst & Young. [2] In 2019, he started working for Alameda Research in Hong Kong. [2] He later became co-chief of FTX Digital Markets, FTX's Bahamas unit. [7]
During the primaries of the 2022 United States elections, Salame donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates. [8]
Salame invested over $6 million in Lenox, Massachusetts restaurants and real estate. [9]
During the 2022 bankruptcy proceedings of FTX, it was revealed that the company loaned Salame $55 million. [3] Salame’s girlfriend Michelle Bond received $400,000 in consulting fees from FTX Digital Markets. [10] Salame claimed to have learned about the impending collapse of FTX in the week before it filed for bankruptcy and to have vomited upon hearing the news. [11] In April 2023 the FBI raided Salame’s Potomac, Maryland home. [12]
In September 2023, he pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws and operating an illegal money-transmitting business. He agreed to forfeit two properties in Lenox, MA along with a Porsche automobile, and to pay a $6 million fine and more than $5 million in restitution to FTX. [13] [7]
Tom Werman is an American record producer responsible for many hard rock and heavy metal albums.
A cryptocurrency exchange, or a digital currency exchange (DCE), is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. Exchanges may accept credit card payments, wire transfers or other forms of payment in exchange for digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. A cryptocurrency exchange can be a market maker that typically takes the bid–ask spreads as a transaction commission for its service or, as a matching platform, simply charges fees.
The Berkshire Eagle is an American daily newspaper published in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and covering all of Berkshire County, as well as four New York communities near Pittsfield. It is considered a newspaper of record for Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
Elm Court is a former Vanderbilt mansion located on Old Stockbridge Road, straddling the town line between Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and until July 2012 was owned and operated as a hotel by descendants of the original owners.
The Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum is a railroad museum located in Lenox, Massachusetts, United States that offers historical exhibits. The museum was founded in 1984 as a not-for-profit organization. During the 1980s and 2003–2011, it offered tourist train rides between Lenox and Stockbridge on the Housatonic Railroad right-of-way. In 2016 the museum began tourist train service in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Kraken is a United States–based cryptocurrency exchange, founded in 2011. It was one of the first bitcoin exchanges to be listed on Bloomberg Terminal and was valued at US$10.8 billion in mid-2022. The company has been the subject of several regulatory investigations since 2018, and has agreed to cumulative fines of over $30 million.
Barbara Helen Fried is an American lawyer and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. She is also the mother of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is an MIT graduate, entrepreneur, and convicted felon.
Alan Joseph Bankman is an American lawyer, Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School, and psychologist. He was also employed at FTX, the cryptocurrency company founded by his son, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is an MIT graduate, entrepreneur, and convicted felon. His tenure at FTX lasted until the company's bankruptcy and subsequent collapse in 2022.
A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.
Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is a global company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high-frequency trading software. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan shortly before the Chinese government restricted cryptocurrency companies. Binance subsequently left Japan for Malta and currently has no official company headquarters.
Samuel Benjamin Bankman-Fried, or SBF, is an American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November 2023. Bankman-Fried founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, and was celebrated as "a kind of poster boy for crypto". At the peak of his success, he was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400.
Solana is a blockchain platform which uses a proof-of-stake mechanism to provide smart contract functionality. Its native cryptocurrency is SOL.
FTX Trading Ltd., commonly known as FTX, is a bankrupt company that formerly operated a fraud-ridden cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund. The exchange was founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang. At its peak in July 2021, the company had over one million users and was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume. FTX is incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda and headquartered in the Bahamas. FTX is closely associated with FTX.US, a separate exchange available to US residents.
Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency exchange company based in Singapore. As of June 2023, the company reportedly had 80 million customers and 4,000 employees. The exchange issues its own exchange token named Cronos (CRO).
Alameda Research was a cryptocurrency trading firm, co-founded in September 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Tara Mac Aulay.
Caroline Ellison is an American former business executive and quantitative trader who served as the CEO of Alameda Research, the trading firm affiliated with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and founded by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. In 2022, she pleaded guilty to fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges related to her role at Alameda Research.
The bankruptcy of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, began in November 2022. The collapse of FTX, caused by a spike in customer withdrawals that exposed an $8 billion hole in FTX’s accounts, served as the impetus for its bankruptcy. Prior to its collapse, FTX was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume and had over one million users.
John J. Ray III is an American attorney and CEO who specializes in recovering funds from failed corporations. He was appointed CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in the aftermath of its November 2022 collapse. He previously served as chairman of Enron Creditors Recovery Corp., a company tasked with recovering creditor funds from Enron in the wake of its accounting scandal and subsequent collapse.
Gary Wang is an American businessman who pleaded guilty for his former role as an executive at cryptocurrency firm FTX. Before co-founding FTX with Sam Bankman-Fried, he worked at Google Flights, building systems for aggregating prices over millions of flights. Prior to FTX's collapse, he was ranked the 227th richest American in the Forbes 400, and the 431st richest person in the world by The World's Billionaires.
United States of America v. Samuel Bankman-Fried was a 2023 federal criminal trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Financial entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, commonly known as SBF, was convicted on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy following the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November 2022.
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