Samuel Bankman-Fried’s poster in downtown San Francisco.MacKenzie Sigalos | CNBCThe Kimchi Swap put Sam Bankman-Fried on the map.The year was 2017, and the ex-Jane Street Capital quant trader noticed something funny when he looked at the page on CoinMarketCap.com listing the price of bitcoin on exchanges around the world. Today, that price is pretty much uniform across the exchanges, but back then, Bankman-Fried previously told CNBC, he would sometimes see a 60% difference in the value of the coin. His immediate instinct, he said, was to get in on the arbitrage trade — buying bitcoin on one exchange, selling it back on another exchange, and then earning a profit equivalent to the price spread.related investing news Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest keeps buying more crypto assets despite FTX bankruptcy16 hours ago”That’s the lowest hanging fruit,” Bankman-Fried said in September.The arbitrage opportunity was especially compelling in South Korea, where the exchange-listed price of bitcoin was significantly more than in other countries. It was dubbed the Kimchi Premium — a reference to the traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented cabbage. After a month of personally dabbling in the market, Bankman-Fried launched his own trading house, Alameda Research — named after his hometown of Alameda, California, near San Francisco — to scale the o …
