Recently, I've seen a few more articles like this. The market is bad, and some people start writing: If SBF hadn't collapsed back then, if FTX were still alive, if that investment in Anthropic still existed... Then they start to express their feelings, saying that the crypto world missed a "historic figure."
Every time I see this kind of narrative, I can't help but want to respond seriously. It's not because SBF as a person is particularly worth discussing, but because this way of thinking itself exposes some deep-rooted problems in the cryptocurrency industry.
First layer: Where did this money come from? Has anyone seriously calculated it?
SBF's investment landscape back then sounds very glamorous. Over 470 projects, a total investment of $5 billion, Anthropic, Sequoia, various DeFi protocols—the list looks impressive.
But where did this money come from?
Alameda Research misappropriated $11,300,000,000 from FTX user accounts. This is a fact established by the court; it is not an accusation but a basis for conviction. In other words, every penny SBF took to invest had a portion coming from ordinary users who stored money in FTX. Those people thought their assets were securely held, but in reality, they had already been used for venture capital.
So when someone says, "If SBF invested in Anthropic, if FTX hadn’t had issues, that equity would be worth $30 billion today"—this "if" itself is a moral trap. Using stolen money to buy a lottery ticket, even if you hit the jackpot, that ticket does not belong to you. The $30 billion increase in value belongs to those users whose assets were misappropriated, not to SBF's investment insight.
Packaging the accounting profits generated from the misappropriated funds as someone's business acumen fundamentally does not hold up.
Layer two: survivor bias, turning luck into unique insight.
Okay, let's assume we set aside moral issues for the time being and look purely from an investment perspective: Is SBF really an investment genius with unique insight?
He invested in more than 470 projects. The vast majority have gone to zero. Various DEXs, liquidity mining protocols, GameFi projects, and altchains—most of the places where he spent money back then are now largely untraceable.
Anthropic is an exception, but exceptions cannot define the rules.
A person holding hundreds of billions in funds will inevitably encounter a few successful projects during the most frenzied phase of a market if they cast a wide net. This is probability, not insight. If we concentrate all our attention on those few success stories and automatically ignore the more than 400 failure cases, that is textbook survivor bias.
Moreover, what does Anthropic's success have to do with FTX? Anthropic's journey to today relies on the deep understanding of AI safety by people like Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano, on the technological iteration of Claude, and on the rise of the entire large language model track. The $500 million from SBF was one of the early funds, but attributing Anthropic's success to SBF's insight is like claiming that some early angel investor determined the fate of Apple, exaggerating the role of the funder while neglecting that the founding team is the core variable.
Layer three: AI drives the crypto market, how did this "brain orgasm" come about?
This is the layer that deserves serious discussion.
The underlying subtext for many people is: If FTX were still around, if SBF were still an important shareholder of Anthropic, AI and crypto would generate deep interactions, and the crypto market would rise on the coattails of AI.
But there is a fundamental question that hasn't been asked: Why does Anthropic need Crypto?
Anthropic is an AI safety company, with its core product being the Claude large language model. Their clients are enterprises and developers, their revenue comes from API calls and subscription services, and their infrastructure is Amazon Cloud and self-built data centers. Where does cryptocurrency fit into their entire business model?
The answer is: Almost nowhere.
Now everywhere there are projects claiming to be in the "AI + Crypto" space, but a closer look reveals that, for the most part, it’s the crypto industry unilaterally trying to ride the wave of AI's popularity, rather than the AI industry genuinely treating blockchain as infrastructure. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind—none of these institutions that are truly driving the AI revolution have advanced because of Crypto.
SBF's holding of shares in Anthropic does not solve this fundamental issue. He can be a shareholder in Anthropic, but he lacks the ability and motivation to make Anthropic embrace the crypto ecosystem. Shareholding and business direction are two different matters.
So the logic chain of "SBF still → FTX is still an Anthropic shareholder → AI drives the crypto market to take off" has every arrow based on one's own assumptions, none of which hold true.
Layer four: What are we really nostalgic for?
Having talked about logic, let’s discuss something more fundamental.
Why does this narrative emerge every time the market is bad? Why is it SBF, rather than other fallen crypto tycoons, that triggers this collective reminiscence?
I believe the answer is less about SBF as a person and more about the characteristics of that era.
From 2021 to the first half of 2022, it was the most violent period of wealth creation in crypto history. No need to research fundamentals, no need to understand technology, no need to grasp token economic models. Just follow the direction of large funds, just get in during the rally, and run before the crash. In that era, analysis without calls was useless, patience was less important than luck, and logic was less important than narrative.
SBF is one of the symbolic figures of that era. He represents a reckless style of throwing caution to the wind, leveraging everything without considering the consequences. His existence lends a kind of "protagonist aura" to the madness of that time.
Now that the market is poor and making money has become difficult, it requires a genuine understanding of products, technology, and macroeconomics to survive in the market. Thus, some people begin to look back at that era when it was possible to make money with eyes closed, projecting this nostalgia onto the symbol of SBF.
But to be clear: what they miss is not SBF, but the era itself. An era where as long as someone violently pulled the market up, as long as the narrative was sexy enough, as long as liquidity was sufficient, any project could rise tenfold.
That era cannot return—rather, every cycle will briefly return and then leave again, leaving behind a new batch of people who have been cut.
Epilogue: What kind of heroic narrative does the crypto industry need?
The real lesson from the SBF incident is not that "we lost a genius," but rather that "we were almost completely destroyed by a meticulously constructed narrative."
He packaged the misappropriation of user assets as "effective altruism," framed speculative investments as "systemic risk management," and presented personal ambition as "contribution to the industry." This narrative once deceived some of the smartest people in the entire industry, including top venture capitalists, regulatory bodies, and media.
Looking back at him now, to some extent, is saying: We have not truly awakened from that scam.
What the crypto industry truly needs has never been a "savior" willing to sprinkle money around using other people's funds. What is needed is a clear regulatory framework, real use cases, infrastructure that can withstand the test of time, and market maturity that does not rely on a single person’s narrative.
The CLARITY Act, tokenization hearings, stablecoin legislation—these dry regulatory advances can determine the future of this industry more than any "era figure."
It’s just that without these things, articles reminiscing about SBF are not enjoyable to read.