Just before crypto markets plunged last yr, Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund made a $1 billion bet on Genesis Digital Assets, a Cyprus-registered bitcoin miner rigged to devour a small city’s value of electricity in Kazakhstan.
The money injection from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research LLC was supersized even for the red-hot crypto startup world, and it dwarfed the FTX founder’s other investments in private corporations.