The Money Game: Jen Wieczner

Crypto’s Moral Ledger For the big trading platforms, the war in Ukraine has turned borderlessness into a liability.

- Illustration by Ben Kothe

When western governments imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, seeking to sever Vladimir Putin’s banks and billionaires from global capital, Sam Bankman-Fried knew his company would have to comply. The 30-year-old, who is a billionaire 20 times over, runs FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s incorporated in Antigua, headquartered in the Bahamas, and regulated in the U.S. Crypto itself may be a borderless, supranational abstraction, but the companies that have sprung up around it are domiciled in places with laws, and they don’t get to pick and choose which ones to obey.

But after Bankman-Fried responded to the new rules, he went a step further. The American decided to block all Russian banks— even unsanctioned ones—from FTX, the better to ensure that the company’s platforms couldn’t be used to funnel assets to the pariah regime. Russian credit cards stopped working on FTX, and the platform stopped accepting Russian deposits. Then Bankman-Fried shut out banks in Kremlin-aligned Belarus as well. For him, the decision was easy, even obvious. “I don’t trust ourselves to be able to distinguish between the sketchiness of each individual institution,” he told me recently from Nassau. “I don’t want to be in a position of guessing, ‘Is this Russian bank, which is not sanctioned, acting as a conduit for that one?’” he said. “That’s a really messy situation, and you don’t want to fuck that up.”