Billy Markus, who is known as a co-founder of the popular meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin – it was created by him in collaboration with Jackson Palmer and launched in 2013 as a parody on the flagship digital currency Bitcoin.
Now, Markus is an active Twitter/X user and a pen-pal of Elon Musk on the same social media platform, unlike Palmer, who tweets very seldom and in a critic of the Tesla CEO. Markus has taken to Twitter to share a curious and perhaps (shocking to some) fact about the founder of FTX – the bankrupt crypto exchange created by Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF planned to buy an island, survive and apocalypse and enhance the mankind genetically on a “sensible” scale.
SBF looked to buy Nauru Island to build survival bunker
Before his brainchild FTX exchange collapsed, the young crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried planned to acquire the Nauri Island with a whole nation living on it. He did it out of security concerns, since apparently SBF expected the human civilization to collapse in the near future. He was unable to predict the collapse of FTX, though.
Therefore, the acquisition of the island was his survival plan for FTX and his own trading firm Alameda Research and their staffers, according to the court filings in a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware in late July.
The memo written by SBF’s brother Gabriel Bankman-Fried (who was also a high-ranked FTX Foundation official) says that the plan was to acquire the Nauru island and build a “bunker/shelter” in case an event may happen that will destroy a significant part of the population (e.g., a massive fire or flood). Among those who that bunker was planned for were members of the effective altruism movement.
In that bunker, the survivors led by SBF wanted to potentially create a lab and establish “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement”.
Here’s comes intriguing part why SBF chose Nauri Island
Nauri is the smallest island state in the world with several times in its history when money-laundering activities were conducted there. Thus, this particular choice of a location for SBF’s “bunker” adds a flavor of intrigue to this story.
According to the court filings, Bankman-Fried himself was accused to defrauding FTX customers of roughly $8 billion in cryptocurrencies they held in the platform’s wallets.
Thus, the actions of SBF do not seem to match the concept of effective altruism, which implies that a group of people accumulates wealth to help those who are underprivileged and his survival plan raises ethical concerns, as well as questions whether he indeed wanted to accumulate a large wealth to help the less privileged.
SBF knew how to save FTX, John Deaton claims
Founder of Crypto-Law.US and a vocal Ripple/XRP advocate John Deaton is a harsh SBF critic. In a recent tweet, he stated that now “crypto is back in full swing again”.
Deaton stated that if Bankman-Friend had not filed for FTX’s bankruptcy and managed to raise enough money (or provide his own funds) to “stop the bleeding” of the FTX platform, he would have managed to save his business and himself from prison.