Animoca Brands Executive Chairman Yat Siu discusses what the guilty verdict for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried means for the broader crypto industry. "In some ways people used to think that if you enter the crypto space, you can kind of get away with stuff," Siu said. The trial against Bankman-Fried demonstrates that there are consequences for bad actors and that "gives people a certain sense of more safety."
I'm somewhere between celebration and definitely cheering it on. Right. I mean, to me, the sort of SPF episode really cast a really dark shadow over the entire industry and it was representative really, it was like the finale of the year 2022 in terms of everything that it represented. And this sort of judgment made a few things clear, I think for people, the first one, something that we in the industry certainly understood. It was just simply a case of fraud. It wasn't a case of the industry having an issue because in some ways, you know, certain media outputs were trying to make it such that crypto was the cause and that, you know, Sam is maybe not such a bad guy after all. But anyway, it turns out that, that it was just plain old fraud that we knew. And I think it's just the end of sort of a chapter and let's move on. And I hope to hear very little of SPF in the future. I know it will still keep going. But for the time being, you know, it's sort of the, the sort of tapering off of that. So I think it's a really good thing, it's a new beginning. But the other thing that I think is also positive, it kind of sends another message, which is that in some ways people used to think that if you enter the crypto space, you can kind of get away with stuff, right, with all the scams and the rug polls and all that kind of stuff. And I think this demonstrates that actually you can't get away, there are consequences. And I think that in and of itself gives people a certain sense of sort of more safety which I think our industry needs in terms of reputation.
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