In the book “Going Infinite” by financial writer Michael Lewis, it is described how the CEO of FTX was worried that his employees were becoming too rich because the price of SRM had risen so much. So he made them wait longer to sell.
Michael Lewis Says Sam Bankman-Fried Is Changing the Rules for His Employees as SRM Gains Value
Many FTX insiders were poised to become incredibly rich in 2021 because they held Serum's SRM.
However, this angered Serum backer Sam Bankman-Fried because these employees might not be willing to work 14 hours a day at the crypto exchange since they are now multi-millionaires on paper.
In his new book, Going Infinite, Michael Lewis explains how the CEO of FTX changed the rules to lock up SRM tokens for longer periods of time so his employees had to wait to sell them.
Crypto companies and their protocols often compensate their employees by giving them a set of tokens and providing that they are given to employees according to a certain schedule.
When it comes to highly liquid cryptocurrencies, it is seen as crucial that insiders do not dump them on individual investors as soon as the tokens start gaining traction.
In the weeks following FTX's bankruptcy and subsequent hack last November, Serum's SRM tokens initiated an emergency fork to address security concerns from the decentralized exchange community.
By the end of November, Binance had delisted most of SRM's trading pairs.
*This is not investment advice.