“Sam Bankman-Fried Hurts the Cryptocurrency Industry”

Emin Gun Sirer said that Sam Bankman-Fried’s alleged fraud damaged the goodwill of the crypto industry. The collapse of FTX last fall cast a disgrace on crypto and discredited the burgeoning industry for legitimacy and trust. According to Ava Labs CEO and Founder Emin Gun Sirer, the damage is huge. Sirer said:

“All this goodwill we built over many years of hard work was usurped by a man who came and played this child prodigy.” Sirer stated that the digital assets industry “made out of nothing” and has become what it is today.”

Sirer added that as a professor of computer science at Cornell University, he works hard to promote education in blockchain technology, in areas such as briefing politicians and hosting workshops. He noted that the thought of how far Bankman-Fried took the industry back was something that kept Sirer up at night, conscious of the shifts in regulatory circles that could be “very bad” for those involved in crypto.

Sirer attributes Bankman-Fried’s under-scrutiny to his image of the FTX founder’s messy hair as he spent so much money on marketing that the world treated him as an unquestionable genius. Sirer said he was also relieved that Ava Labs was never one of the tokens called Sam coin defended by the discredited crypto boss whose prices were allegedly inflated, including Solana and FTX’s exchange token FTT. “We were never a Sam coin and therefore we were left out of all this madness,” Sirer said.