How the two biggest crypto billionaire CEOs proved the critics right

After a brutal 18 months of bankruptcies, company failures and criminal trials, the crypto market is starting to claw back some of its former standing.

Bitcoin is up more than 150% this year. Meanwhile, Solana is nearly 10x higher in the last 12 months, and bitcoin miner Marathon Digital has also skyrocketed. Crypto-pegged stocks like Coinbase, MicroStrategy and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust rose more than 300% in value year-to-date.

But even as prices swell, the sector’s reputation has struggled to regain ground after names virtually synonymous with bitcoin have both been found guilty of crimes directly related to their multibillion-dollar crypto empires.

For years, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried preached the power of decentralized, digital currencies to the masses. Both were bitcoin billionaires who ran their own global cryptocurrency exchanges and spent much of their professional career selling the public on a new, tech-powered world order; one where an alternative financial system comprised of borderless virtual coins would liberate the oppressed by eliminating middlemen like banks and the over-reach of the government.

Yet they both, in the end, helped crypto critics and regulators make the case that some of them had been right all along; that the industry was rife with grifters and fraudsters intent on using new tech to carry out age-old crimes.

Even when the crypto market was at its hottest, as token prices hit all-time highs in Oct. 2021, some of the biggest names in business and politics shared their doubts.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in 2021 at peak crypto valuations that bitcoin was “worthless,” and he doubled down on that sentiment earlier this year when he said that the digital currency was a “hyped-up fraud.” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in 2018 that he would short…