Before his undoing this month, crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried aggressively pursued powerful allies in Washington. None was more important than Rostin Behnam.
The chief of the federal agency that oversees commodities markets, Behnam holds a strategic perch among the nation’s financial regulators. And the 44-year-old Washington bureaucrat was indispensable in the boyish billionaire’s ambitious plans to reshape U.S. crypto regulation.
Since last year, the two have worked in parallel on critical initiatives which, if not for the sudden demise of Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire, might have radically altered the nation’s attempts to govern the freewheeling market for digital currencies.
Now that FTX has collapsed amid allegations of fraud, those initiatives may be doomed. But as the financial world examines why major firms threw hundreds of millions of dollars at the 30-year-old Bankman-Fried, the capital is looking anew at his courtship of Washington and why he sought to build ties with Behnam and the agency he leads, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Source: Why the CFTC was Sam Bankman-Fried’s favorite Washington agency – The Washington Post
