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From secretly acquiring “grey area” cash-for-crypto businesses to buying political influence to paying off lawyers, the FTX adversary cases describe incredibly shady practices that are far from as unusual as the crypto industry likes to claim. Remember: all of these activities happened while FTX ran Super Bowl ads about being a “safe and easy way to get into crypto” and Bankman-Fried described his business at every opportunity as “the most regulated crypto exchange by far”. Troublingly, the conditions that enabled FTX’s fraud remain unchanged today. Lack of auditing is the norm. Knee-jerk resistance to regulation remains the default industry-wide, and the industry refined Bankman-Fried’s early attempts at political influence, spending over $130 million to install handpicked surrogates in Washington to further reduce any chance of meaningful oversight. With the same red flags waving across today’s cryptocurrency industry, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that similar frauds have only yet to be discovered. The primary difference may be that other firms haven’t faced their CZ moment yet: the pushing over of the first domino that causes the whole precarious thing to collapse.