A former Alameda Research engineer told how he worked with the founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange and about the “pitfalls” of this once popular trading platform.

Aditya Baradwaj, in a series of tweets, told how he left a stable position at Google in order to enter the world of cryptocurrencies, and then shared his personal impressions of the office of Sam Bankman-Fried (Sam Bankman-Fried). The headquarters was very far from the image of the premises of the company, “tossing billions of dollars.” The office was nondescript, Baradwaj said, on the fourth floor of a typical Berkeley business center. Next door was the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary.

The atmosphere at the workplace was very casual: Bankman-Fried traded cryptocurrencies, talked on the phone with clients while playing video games. The engineer managed to hear a snippet of one of these conversations, when Bankman-Fried said to someone: “Decentralization is the future. The most valuable thing you can do is quit everything you do and go into cryptocurrencies.”

“Both companies: FTX and Alameda were closely related. Shared offices, shared events, and even shared living arrangements were the norm,” says Baradwaj.

The founder of FTX often told employees about plans that go beyond the usual cryptocurrency exchange. Bankman-Fried liked to discuss a wide variety of topics: vaccines, biotech research, humanitarian issues, and even veganism. The businessman told employees about his intention to move the company to the Bahamas. However, Bankman-Fried did not succeed in realizing his grandiose plans: to build a plant for the production of vaccines or to eradicate malaria, the engineer laments. FTX’s clients, investors, and employees – the ones who trusted him the most – suffered financial losses. And the ruins of the FTX office still lie on the beaches of Nassau.

Baradwaj said that in a year and a half at FTX, his life has changed dramatically. He regularly flew around the world between Berkeley, Hong Kong and the Bahamas, meeting celebrities, sports icons and political figures.

“At the same time, I saw irresponsibility: a company operating in billions of dollars was carelessly managing risks. Technical debt that would make any programmer cry. An extravagance that has cost millions of dollars. And now Bankman-Fried is behind bars, violating the conditions of house arrest, ”the former Alameda employee stated.

Aditya Baradwaj promised that if subscribers were interested in learning more about the internal machinations at FTX and Alameda, he would post more “revealing tweets”.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers recently demanded better prison conditions. Being a vegan, the founder of FTX cannot eat normally in prison, which is detrimental to health. This hinders preparations for the upcoming court hearings, the defense claims.