After Early Struggles, Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research Overcomes Bumpy Start to Pave Way for FTX Exchange

Sam Bankman-Fried raised $170M from investors for his trading firm Alameda Research, which initially lost millions per day in 2017.

Alameda's first trading bots and strategies were mostly losing bets, with some funds disappearing entirely.

A bot called Modelbot was programmed to trade hundreds of tokens but made no distinction between liquid majors and illiquid memecoins.

Alameda finally became profitable after Gary Wang coded a successful quant trading system and Nishad Singh managed operations.

Alameda's eventual profitability put it on track to launching the FTX crypto exchange.