Alameda Co-CEO Trabucco Steps Down From Crypto Trading Firm

Alameda Research Co-Chief Executive Officer Sam Trabucco is stepping down, saying he’s chosen “to prioritize other things” and that he couldn’t “continue to justify the time investment” of being an integral part of the crypto trading firm. 

Caroline Ellison, the co-CEO, Will lead the company and Trabucco will serve as an adviser, he announced in a series of tweets Wednesday. Alameda, the trading affiliate of FTX crypto exchange controlled by Sam Bankman-Fried, confirmed the changes. FTX is one of the world’s largest platforms for trading digital-assets. 

Trabucco, 29, and Ellison became co-CEOs after Alameda co-founder Bankman-Fried stepped down from the position. Trabucco, who joined Alameda in 2019, said he had been reducing his involvement with Alameda and would no longer have a strong day-to-presence with the company. He said that during his time at the Bahamas-based firm, it was difficult to spend a normal amount of time at work and that he had purchased a boat and had been enjoying spending time with friends and family.   

Alameda, which Bankman-Fried, 30, launched prior to co-founding FTX, has been credited with helping to propel the crypto billionaire to international fame and success. But despite being one of the industry’s top market makers and an investor in major startups like crypto bank Anchorage Digital, nonfungible token marketplace Magic Eden and crypto payments platform MobileCoin, Alameda has made major missteps during Trabucco’s tenure.

The firm offered a $485 million loan to Voyager Digital, a crypto lending platform that the firm had previously invested in. Despite the massive lifeline, Voyager still collapsed into bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried blamed the debacle on a lack of time to conduct full due diligence.

“We gave what was a fairly substantial line of credit that would have fully backed all of their liabilities, but we were a little bit nervous and uncertain about how that one was going to play out,” Bankman-Fried said in a previous interview with Bloomberg. “We put ourselves in a situation where we might lose money.”

After the company filed for bankruptcy, Alameda and FTX offered to buy most of Voyager’s digital assets and digital asset loans, other than those to disgraced hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, in cash at market value. Voyager called the proposal a “low-ball bid” that disrupted the bankruptcy process.

FTX and Alameda’s distressed deal-making during crypto winter has also provided fodder to critics who believe Bankman-Fried is consolidating power over the crypto industry, which many think should be decentralized.

Alameda has faced other criticism. Last year, The decentralized finance platform Reef Finance accused Alameda of trying to dump tokens it received as part of an investment and threated to have the Reef tokens delisted on major exchanges if the firm didn’t move forward on a deal. Alameda denied strong-arming the firm.

Alameda also has a $12.7 million claim as a loan party against Celsius Network, a crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy in July. The company is Celsius’s 13th-biggest unsecured creditor, according to court filings. Bankman-Fried previously told Bloomberg that FTX passed on the opportunity to bail out Celsius prior to the company’s descent into bankruptcy.

Trabucco previously worked at Susquehanna International Group’s bond ETF desk and graduated from MIT in 2015, the same university that Bankman-Fried attended.

— With assistance by Olga Kharif